


Say You'll Remember Me

by Willaphyx



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, and when i say loosely inspired by, i mean that the premise was inspired by it and then it grew into this, implied wellven, it's fluffy and yet also angsty, so it's there but sometimes you have to squint, so like it's a mixed bag, summer romance au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-06-06 10:22:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 39,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6750076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Willaphyx/pseuds/Willaphyx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke wasn't expecting to find romance on her family's annual summer escape to Kennebunkport, Maine.  But then, she also wasn't expecting Bellamy Blake.</p><p>Or a summer romance AU loosely inspired by Taylor Swift's Wildest Dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so I’ve been talking about and writing this fic for fucking years, and I know that but here it finally is! Basically my life [Catherine](http://neiljoustens.tumblr.com) asked for something based off Taylor Swift’s Wildest Dreams years and years ago and it grew into this, the 12-part fluffy but also angsty Bellarke summer romance AU that has been my life for the last six months.
> 
> Updates will be posted on Wednesdays and Saturdays!
> 
> You can find the [hereE!](http://8tracks.com/willaphyx/say-you-ll-remember-me)

The first time Clarke sees him is at the Kennebunkport River Club’s Season Opening Gala.She’s stopped listening to the conversation she was supposed to be a part of five minutes ago and the dark-haired stranger, scratching at the collar of his over-starched polo is the most interesting person in the room.

 

Clarke herself is uncomfortable in her flippy summery yet formal dress, not that she’d ever let on to that.She’d been trained out of such habits a long time ago.After all, the daughter of world famous neurosurgeon Abigail Griffin and Wall Street trader Jake Griffin could hardly be allowed to look out of place at a gathering such as this.Not when her future husband could be the blonde in the Harvard rowing pullover.Or the brunette by the punch bowl trying to surreptitiously slip the flask he emptied into his glass back into his pocket.

But this dark-haired man is different.There’s something about the way he holds himself, vigilant and watchful, like he didn’t know how he’d gotten there.And yet, he blended in.Collared polo, ironed khakis, spotless Sperry’s.

In a town where Clarke knew everyone, or at least everyone worth knowing, a stranger was a rare occurrence.Especially one who was well connected enough to earn an invitation to an event like this one.He was an enigma.And with the Jahas’ absence in Kennebunkport this year Clarke could do a lot with a good enigma.

“Clarke honey?”

Clarke startled.

Abby and her group of overly-Botoxed friends are looking at her expectantly.

“Sorry I zoned out.”Clarke smiles, a wide fake affair that had become far too much of a practiced effort.

“Mrs. Cooke was just asking about Brown,” Abby tells her.

 _Of course_ , Clarke thought.

“Yes, I’m very excited,” she parrots, just like she had since March when she’d been accepted.Another four years of doing what her parents wanted and then maybe, just maybe, she’d be able to escape.Escape from the world of Ivy League schools and pressed collars and starched sheets and summer house bedrooms that were larger than the average apartment.

“And then med school,” another woman titters.

Clarke nods.“That’s the plan.”

“So, neuroscience like your mother?Or something else?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

Abby’s jaw clenches.Clarke smiles.It was the little victories.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, that punch looks _delicious_.”

It really doesn’t.Chances are it’s just designer Kool-Aid like last year and somehow despite the fact that it was quadruple the price, it tasted worse.Clarke ladles a bit into her cup and sniffs at the bright red liquid.She grimaces and sips.Gags.

“Good shit, huh?”

 

The apathetic looking blonde girl jumps and spins around, almost throwing her drink across Bellamy’s shirt.

“Whoa, careful there, princess, I just got this dry cleaned.”

He brushes a fake piece of dirt off his sleeve.When he looks up, she’s glaring.

He spreads his hands in a peace offering.“I’m just joking.”He glances around and leans in closer to her.“Honestly, you’d be doing me a favor if you did dump it all over me and I’d have an excuse to leave.This thing sucks.”

She’s grinning now, too.

“First time?” she asks, and her voice is bright and musical.Not at all like Bellamy was expecting but it suited her, nonetheless.

He shuffles a little.“My mom just bought that place on King’s Highway?The one that was—“

“For sale for like nine years, yeah, I know it.”She appraises him.“Nice view.”

He’s not sure if that was meant as an innuendo or not.“I’m Bellamy,” he offers, sticking out his hand.

“Clarke.Griffin.”Her handshake is strong and firm, her palm warm against his.

Bellamy’s heart may have skipped the smallest of beats.

 

The next time Clarke sees Bellamy he’s in her backyard carrying a bucket and a shovel, wandering barefoot down the sand, trailing after a teenaged girl with long dark locks and a ringing laugh.

She grabs her coffee off the counter and walks out onto the balcony.

“Hey, stranger!” she yells and waves when he spins around.

It seems to take him a minute but he waves back, nearly hitting his companion in the head with his shovel in the process.

“Jesus Christ, Bell!” wafts across to her and Clarke smiles.

“What are you doing in my backyard?” she asks, a little bit joking, a little bit serious.

He wanders over closer, grinning, and holds up the pail.“Clamming?” he offers.

“It’s a good thing my mom’s not home,” she tells him, eyes sliding to Bellamy’s friend who is warily coming closer, trailing her own shovel.“This is technically private property, you know.”

His eyes widens.“Shit, seriously?O, I _told_ you.”

The girl, O, rolls her eyes.“It’s a beach, I don’t see how anyone can own the fucking beach.”

“Tell that to my parents,”Clarke replies.“They pay a lot of money to say they do.”

Neither of them has anything to say to that.

Clarke jerks a thumb over her finger.“You want to come in?”

The two on the beach share a helpless glance and Bellamy shrugs.“Sure!” he calls back.

The formalness of the sitting room has always bothered Clarke.Maybe it was something about the ships in bottles in the display case, or the giant family portrait over the mantel, stiff and awkward like the decorative throw pillows no one was allowed to lean against, but it had never felt right to her.More like the whole room, the whole house really, was a giant front showing what her parents wanted the world to see, a way of sealing over the fractures that grew bigger and bigger anyway.Somehow this was all the more glaring with Bellamy sitting on her couch.

Clarke folds herself into the stiff-backed rocking chair and studies him as he studies the room.

“This is my sister, Octavia, by the way,” he says suddenly, gesturing.

Clarke nods.“I’m Clarke,” she says.

Octavia smiles slightly.“Yeah, I know, he wouldn’t shut up about you after that gala.”

Bellamy elbows her.She grins.

“I go to the bathroom and miss everything interesting.”

Clarke laughs.

“You said you were on King’s Highway, right?” she asks.

They nod.And now she can see the resemblance where before she’d been missing it.There’s something about the jut of their cheekbones, and maybe the arch of their foreheads.And yet the differences are even more apparent.Where Octavia’s skin is almost as alabaster pale as Clarke’s, Bellamy’s is just beginning to adopt the sun-kissed tone of summer over an olive complexion and was populated by a small army of freckles.And their eyes.If Clarke hadn’t heard it from Bellamy himself she never would have guessed that they were even remotely related.

“Long way to walk just for clams.”

“There’s some sort of housewarming party going on at our house,” Bellamy explains.

“A lot of pastels and pearls,” Octavia adds.

“And casseroles.”

Clarke grins.“I guarantee you none of those housewives can make a casserole.”

“That makes it worse,” Bellamy mutters and Clarke can’t help her laugh.

It was that moment that Octavia’s phone buzzes in her pocket.She pulls it out and sighs loudly.“I’ve been summoned.”She stands.“Thanks for taking us in, Clarke.”

“You know how to get home?” Bellamy asks, worry knitting his brow.

Octavia rolls her eyes.“Yes, Bellamy, I know how to get home, I’m not an idiot.”

He chews on his lip and watches as she crosses back through the sitting room to the deck and jumps down the stairs.It isn’t until she’s just a small dot against the expanse of sea and sand that Clarke breaks the silence.

“So what kind of casseroles?”

Bellamy laughs.

Suddenly everything is awkward.Clarke had never had an issue talking to people before, at least not about the easy things.The weather, maybe, or how their wife or kids were or how school was going.But for some reason Bellamy is different.For the first time in a long time, Clarke cared.It was a strange feeling.

Bellamy’s eyes seem stuck on the painting hung over the mantel.It was a monstrous thing, really, commissioned by Abby when Clarke was in middle school, and everyone looked younger, less haggard.The easier days.Sometimes Clarke misses them.

“Your parents?” Bellamy asks, gesturing.

She nods.

“Does it ever scare the shit out of you in the middle of the night?Like you come downstairs for a snack and that’s just _staring_ at you.”

Clarke snorts, dissolving into laughter.Bellamy grins at her, a rakish smile and Clarke feels herself slipping.They said that Helen of Troy had a smile that could launch a thousand ships.But Bellamy?That smile could have thawed the ice even around Clarke’s heart.

She wasn’t sure which was worse.

 

Bellamy didn’t hear from Clarke again for a week.And that wasn’t to say that he was expecting to hear from her.But that didn’t mean he wasn’t a little bit disappointed.

“It’s to be expected,” Octavia had said to him one night in semi-darkness as they stretched out on the still sun-warmed roof.

It was a childhood tradition of theirs, one that had started with screaming downstairs, the sound of smashing plates, slamming doors.Back then they’d slept in the same room, Octavia’s homemade canopy, draped with pink taffeta, mere feet away from Bellamy’s simple twin covered in a threadbare comforter patterned with superheroes.She’d watch him with bright eyes, wide and scared, clutching the stuffed animal of the month, as their parents’ voices got louder and louder.

Until one night, Bellamy snapped.He’d swung his legs out of bed and tugged O out of hers.And, grabbing the bar of chocolate he always kept stashed in their shared bedside table, he’d led her out the window, climbing up the slightly sloping roof until they’d reached the top.It was breathlessly silent up there, with only the stars and each other for company.And that first night Bellamy had seen the exhaustion and the stress drain out of Octavia.

Eventually their father had left in a spectacular show of slamming doors and clothes ripped out of closets and expletives so colorful Bellamy’s ears had been ringing ever since.But still, Bellamy and Octavia climbed onto the roof, sometimes in silence and sometimes to talk.

The view from the house on King’s Highway was different than any Bellamy had ever seen.There was the thinnest strip of road, barely visible over the lip of the roof, and then the never-ending deep blue of Goosefare Bay, the outline of Timber Island barely visible, more of a specter, a fleeting illusion than anything.

“She’s not like us,” Octavia had said, and Bellamy hated that at just the young age of fifteen she already sounded so jaded.

“We’re as much like any of them as they’ll ever be,” Bellamy had replied, softly, “at least on the outside.”

Octavia looked at him.“They know nothing about us.”

“They don’t know anything about each other, either.”

She opened her mouth to say something but he beat her to it.

“What kind of cars they drive, sure, or what hedge fund their husband works for, how much money they make, or how many times they’ve been to the Amalfi Coast.But that’s not what makes a person, O.It’s the little things, the small things, the things they all hide from each other.”

“All I’m saying,” Octavia said cautiously, “is be careful.And don’t forget where she came from.”She gestured out to the crashing waves, the stars, more than Bellamy had ever seen.“None of this makes us like them, not really.And sooner or later, they’ll figure that out.”

“Are you talking about all of them?Or one person in particular?”

She was quiet for a long time.“I don’t want you to get hurt,” she said finally.

“I’ve been hurt before,” Bellamy replied.“Always bounced back eventually.”

“Everything has to break eventually, big brother,” she said solemnly.“And each time I have to watch you bend, I worry this is the last time.”

“When did you get so smart, Octavia Blake?”

“You could say it’s a side effect of having such a dumb ass for a brother.”

He smiles despite himself and reaches out to ruffle her hair.


	2. Chapter 2

“Clarke, honey?”

Clarke stares up at her ceiling, painted a light sky blue that Abby had very much disapproved of, along with the murals that Clarke had added to the walls over the years.  (“But how will we ever sell it?” Abby had fretted when eight year old Clarke, proud and radiant, had shown her the first.)  She rolled over, stared out the open window.  A seagull flies past.  She smiles.

“Clarke!”

Abby’s footsteps are coming up the stairs now.  Clarke rolls off her bed, groaning and opens the door just before Abby did.  Her mother looks borderline furious, hands planted on her hips, hair slightly askew.

“I was calling you.”

“I was in the bathroom,” Clarke offers.

“Oh, well, I have some dresses downstairs for you to try on.  The party’s in four hours.”

Clarke’s stomach drops.  Abby looks her up and down, taking in her casual state of undress for the first time.

“Why aren’t you getting ready?”

 _I forgot_ , Clarke wants to say, but when she opens her mouth, something else comes out entirely.

“I can’t go.  I have a date.”

Abby stares at her.

“A date?” she manages.

“Yeah, Mom, a date.”

“Oh, well, then.”  She’s flustered, out of her depth, it had been a long time since Clarke had willingly gone on a date with anyone that she hadn’t chosen.  “Wear the blue shirt, it brings out your eyes.”

And then she closes the door.  Clarke stares at it, shocked that that had actually worked.  She grins up at her ceiling but the feeling is short lived.  It wouldn’t take Abby long to notice that Clarke hadn’t gone out, and even if she just went somewhere herself, she’d never be able to craft a lie detailed enough to hold up under Abby’s barrage of questions.  She rubs her eyes.

 

“Bellamy!”

Thundering footsteps on the stairs, the sound of O’s frenzied body hitting the wall on the second floor landing.

Bellamy grins to himself and smoothes out a wrinkle in the shirt he’s folding.

His door burst open.

“Someone’s here for you,” she says cryptically.  “You might want to get changed.”

He turns to her, confused.  “What?”

“Put on a shirt, Bellamy,” is all she says before disappearing back down the hallway, leaving his doorway ajar.

He tilts his head, listening hard.

“Griffin,” says a familiar voice.  “Yeah, Abby and Jake’s daughter.”

If he’d been standing he would have fallen over.  What the hell was Clarke Griffin doing in his house?

He reaches for the closest shirt and tugs it over his head.

Clarke is standing across from his mother in their foyer, smiling and making quiet small talk.  Her eyes slide over Aurora Blake’s shoulder to find him hovering on the stairs and she grins.  And damn if that girl didn’t shine brighter than the sun when she wanted to.

“Hey,” she says and he finds himself grinning hopelessly back.

“Hey,” he echoes.

“I know this is really really random but I was going to a park a couple towns over and…well, I could use some company.”  She pauses.  “Yours, if that wasn’t already obvious.”

His grin stretches impossibly wider.  “Yeah, let me just go get a coat.”

She nods.  “Okay.”

Clarke didn’t drive the kind of car he expected.  It’s nice, sure, but several years old.  There’s a scuff on her back bumper, one of her license plates is bent out of shape, and there are candy wrappers on the floor of the back seat.  He loves it.

“Sorry, it’s a bit of a mess,” she says, “I forgot to clean the car when we left last summer and haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

His mind flashes to the Maine license plates.  Of course.

“You have two cars?”

She shrugs.  “My mom insisted.”  She releases the parking brake.  “Ready?”

He can’t take his eyes off her right hand, wrapped loose and easy around the gearshift.  He hadn’t expected someone like Clarke Griffin to be able to drive stick but the girl is nothing if not an endless barrage of surprises.  Watching her shift gears is mesmerizing, the easy fluidity with which her hand moves, the slight catch in motion, even if it was soundless, as the engine clicks over from first to second, second to third.

“Where are we going?” he asks after they leave the city limits, winding along a road next to the shore.

Clarke rolls down her window and sticks out her hand, transferring her right to the wheel.  The wind whips her hair back.

“Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth.  It’s where I always go when I need to escape.”

He looks out the window, watching the trees flash past.  Clarke shifts into fourth.

“And why am I here?”

She looks over at him but he barely caught her at it, the glance was that quick.  Over before it had even begun.

“My parents are going to some sort of party at someone’s house tonight,” she says.  “I didn’t want to go.  So I told her I had a date.”  She shrugs.  “And then I guess I actually needed to go somewhere with someone.”  She swallows.  “And you’re the only person in this damn town I want to spend any time with.”

Bellamy grins out the window. “Okay,” he says simply.

Because damn if he isn’t okay with that.

 

Clarke feels calmer already.  There’s something about Bellamy, she’s realizing, that grounds her.  Maybe it’s the realness of him, the openness and the honesty.

She hadn’t been planning on asking him to come with her when she left.  When she’d pulled out of her driveway she hadn’t even known where she was going.  But the next thing she knew, she was cruising down King’s Highway with only one destination in mind.  And Crescent Beach State Park had been the only logical place to take him.

The simple sign welcomes them in, creaking in the barely there wind coming off the water.  The parking lot is nearly deserted, something Clarke is thankful for.  It’s a bit too early for the majority of the vacationers to come out and the locals mostly keep to themselves.  She parks and retrieves the blanket she keeps in her trunk.  She shoulders her bag and starts in the direction of the beach, confident that Bellamy will follow.

Just as she’d been expecting, the thin strip of sand is nearly empty.  The tide is out, exposing a stretch of dark sand, and the lifeguard chair is unoccupied. She lays down the blanket a distance from the beach’s other patrons and sits.  Bellamy follows her lead, sitting closer than he had to.  Their knees brush slightly.

“This is nice,” Bellamy says after a long pause.  He’s stretched out, resting back on his hands, posture open.

“It’s my favorite place in this whole state.”

He looks over at her.  “You feel the need to escape a lot, don’t you?”

“That obvious, huh?”

He laughed.  “It’s nothing bad.  I can… well, I guess I can understand.”

“How do you like the town?”

“It’s nice,” he says.  “Not what I was expecting when my mom told us we were moving to Maine.”

Now it’s her turn to laugh.  “Yeah, no.”  She pauses.  “I know this is really personal so you don’t have to answer but —“

“My dad?” he asks and she looked over, nodding seriously.  “He’s a giant raging douche bag.  Out of the picture,” he adds and she nods again.

“How long ago?”

“Three years.”

They sit in silence for another long moment and it’s not awkward, it’s not weird, it’s not even peaceful.  It just _is_.  They’re Bellamy and Clarke and this is the most time they’ve spent together since they met a week and a half ago and it’s a beautiful thing, to find companionable silence.  Clarke almost hates to break it.

“My dad used to bring me out here when I was a kid,” she says quietly.  “Back before he got dragged into all the ‘howdy-do’ shit.”  She feels Bellamy’s eyes on her but she can’t look away from the water.  “That was just my mom’s thing for a long time.”

“And now?”

“And now it’s like I’m an island,” she answers, finally, after a long pause.  “Like I’m the only one in the family who knows me anymore.”

He shifts closer.  Their forearms brush and her skin zings with electricity.

“Well, I know I’m not much, but you got me.”

She almost laughs at the incredulity of it.  “You don’t even know me.”

“That’s what O said.”

She looks over, finds him staring back at her with those steady brown eyes.  A girl could get lost in those eyes.  And Clarke’s not sure there’d be any reason to climb out.  “But?’ she prompted.

“But I don’t think it matters much.”

“No,” she replied.  “No, I guess not.”

She looks back out at the waves, leans into him a little.  “You’re a good man, Bellamy Blake.”

“Now you have no idea if that’s true.  I could run red lights.  Or graffiti public property.  Maybe I once didn’t call the fire department when I saw someone’s cat stuck in a tree.”

She laughs, a loud echoing sound that surprises her.  Clarke hasn’t laughed like that in a long time.  “If that’s your definition of bad things, I don’t really know how to tell you this but…. that’s okay,” she tells him in a stage whisper.

He smiles, knocks their shoulders together.  “If you say so.”

“Where are you from?” she asks suddenly.

He looked over.  “I’m sorry?”

“Your accent, she says quickly.  “I can’t place it.”

“Oh.  Yeah.  Virginia.  The accent’s not really strong though.  O barely has one at all.”

And she can hear the Southern drawl now, barely audible under what was probably years of practice to cover it up.

“I’ve always loved Southern accents,” she tells him.  “They sound homey and welcoming, you know?”

“If only all Southerners were like that.”  His tone is bitter.  “And you?  Where does Clarke Griffin hail from?”

“Cape Cod.”

“What no, Bahstun accent?”  He draws out the a sound, making it sound almost obscene.

She punches his shoulder.  “Thank God, no.”

“Is this where I tell you that I actually really like Boston accents?”  There’s a hidden smile in his voice and Clarke rolls her eyes.

“I was being serious,” she complains.

“Who’s to say I’m not?”  His eyes are wide, pleading and she almost falls for it if it wasn’t for the smirk curling around the edges of his lips.  “You parhk the cahr?”

“Okay, I take back what I said before, you’re a _jerk_.”

His grin is wide, infectious, and Clarke has to look away.  She hadn’t been expecting any of this, she hadn’t _wanted_ this.  There’s something about Bellamy Blake that’s too vibrant, too bright.  Clarke had become so used to living in sepia, remaining just a step away from everything and everyone, that she hadn’t even realized she was throwing herself in head first until she was no longer within reach of the ledge.  God help her she was falling.

His smile fades a little, but the crinkles around his eyes deepen.  “What?”

Clarke tilts her head.  “Nothing.”

“Then why are you looking at me like that?”

“Why did you agree to come with me?  Here, I mean.”

The rest of his smile fades.  “You asked.”

“Bellamy.”

He looks away.  “Honestly, that’s it.”  He looks back at her, eyes piercing.  “We just moved three weeks ago.  Turning down friends isn’t exactly in my best interest.”

 

 _Desperate, Blake_ , he chides himself but Clarke’s looking at him intensely, maybe a bit too intensely, and Bellamy wonders what she’s reading in his expression.  A crinkle appears between her eyes, like she’s stuck on something.  He barely manages to stop himself from reaching out and smoothing it over with her finger.

“I told my mom I had a date,” she says finally and that is quite literally _the last thing_ that Bellamy was expecting to hear.

“I’m sorry, what?”

It wasn’t that Bellamy would be opposed to such an endeavor.  In fact, the idea of a date with Clarke gets his heart racing in a way that he’s too terrified to fully admit to himself.

“There was some fancy party or whatever.”  She’s not looking at him anymore, waves a hand dismissively.  “I…I don’t know I just…couldn’t really stand the idea of being there.  You know?”

He fights the sinking feeling in his stomach.  He’d been convenient that was all.

“And I was thinking about it,” she continues.  “And I could have come out here alone and made some shit up about what I did all day but… somehow I ended up in your driveway.”

Their eyes connect again and it’s like she’s daring him to say something.

“I’m glad you did,” is all he can manage.

She smiles, wide, and Bellamy feels like he’s floating.

 _Too deep,_ he tells himself.   _You’re in way too deep, you fucker_.

“Me, too,” she says softly.

And she leans her head on his shoulder, and she smells like roses.  Her hair tickles his cheek but he doesn’t mind because this is real, she’s there and he’s there, and damn, Bellamy Blake is head over fucking heels for Clarke Griffin.

 

The sky is barely dusky when Clarke tells Bellamy that they should be heading back.  But it’s late and she shouldn’t try Abby’s patience too much.

He just nods and pushes himself to his feet, then leans down to shake out the blanket and you can’t really blame Clarke if she takes the opportunity to let her eyes linger on the long, limber lines of his torso.

And that smile he offers her when he passes her back the blanket.  Clarke’s heart jerks.  She makes herself look away.

“Thank you for coming,” she tells him as they start the trek back out.

“It was my pleasure.  Thank you for asking.”  A brief pause before he adds, “I was worried that our meetings were going to be limited to fancy parties neither of us want to be at and me accidentally trespassing in your backyard.”

She laughs.  “An interesting start to a friendship, I must say.”

He just smiles in response.  The back of his hand brushes past hers and Clarke forces herself to take a breath.

They’re back at the car before he speaks again.

Hand on the door, fingers loosely wrapped around the latch, staring at his shoes, he says, “Clarke…” in this careful way that makes her way too anxious.

“Yes?”

“I have no issues with being your fake boyfriend for your mom’s sake.  You know, get you out of family events and things but…”

He stops.  Her breath catches.

“But I like you, Clarke.  A lot.”  He looks up and she sees nothing but naked truth reflected there.  “And I’m kind of going out on a limb here and I realize that we don’t really know each other, like at all, but…do you want to go on a real date with me?”

She feels like her grin is going to split her face in half.  She’s nodding frantically before she even realizes she’d started.

“Yes,” is all she can say.  “Yes, that sounds incredible.”

And she’s certain that Bellamy’s answering smile is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Drop me a comment here or on [tumblr](http://andrevvminyard.tumblr.com) if you enjoyed the chapter!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So who likes adorable first dates because that's what you're getting. Thank you, everyone who has been reading this so far, I've spent so much time slaving over this fic that it means a lot! I hope you enjoy the chapter!

Bellamy spends the next five days with, in Octavia’s words, “a giant fucking bee up his ass.”  By day three, he’s decided that when this business is over he really needs to talk to her about her language.

He goes through five shirts and two pairs of jeans before settling on a t-shirt and his least worn pair of pants.  He’s in the middle of trying to tamp down his hair when his sister sails in in a pair of sweatpants and one of his shirts.  He envies the ease with which she grins at him.

“You look like you’re trying too hard, big bro.”

She throws herself backwards on the bed, bouncing slightly.

Bellamy drops the comb and frowns at his reflection.

“Do I look okay?”

“You look fine, Bell, now go pick up your pseudo-girlfriend and go wow her or some shit.”

“She’s not my pseudo-girlfriend,” he mumbles.

She smirks.  “You’re whipped, Bell.”

He tamps down the potentially mean-spirited comment that bubbles up in response and pulls out two of his nicer jackets.  “Which one?”

She tilts her head, points to the left one.  “It makes you look like you know how to have fun.”

Bellamy’s too distracted by his upcoming date to decipher the layers of compliment and insult.

“Thanks, O, I’ll see you for dinner.”

“What, you mean, you’re not going to drive off into the sunset and elope?  You’ve already been on one date, Bell, clock’s ticking.”

He rolls his eyes.  “Goodbye, Octavia.”  He sticks his head back into the room to see her still lying on his bed.  “And go to your own room, for God’s sake.”

Bellamy could have guessed from Clarke’s living room that her house would be fancy, even by Kennebunkport standards, and he wasn’t wrong.  The house is massive, three floors with a circular drive that was probably paved with crushed gravel.  Bellamy feels half-tempted to park his piece of shit car on the street.  He swallows quickly and turns into the driveway.

The front deck is stained dark, a stark contrast to the thick green paint on the door.  The house itself is painted a bright white, matching the impeccably clean patio furniture arrange perfectly on the deck.  Bellamy takes a minute to inspect the perfectly ironed lines of the cushions and wonders if anyone’s ever sat on them.

He rings the bell.

Clarke yanks the door open almost immediately, a wide grin on her face.

“Bellamy!  Hey!”  She steps back and holds the door open.  “Come in.”

He hesitates over the doorway, eyes drawn to the summer yellow of her sundress.

“My mom wants to meet you,” she adds, voice almost apologetic.

Bellamy is rocketed back into the present.  “Your mom?”

She bites her lip.  “I know, I’m sorry.  But please?”

There’s no way in hell he can argue with that pleading tone in your voice.  Honestly in that dress he would have done anything for her.

“Clarke?” a voice calls from further inside the house.

Clarke’s eyes are apologetic as Bellamy steps inside and she snaps the door shut.

“She’s not that bad, I promise,” she whispers into his ear before leading him down a wood-paneled hallway.

The rest of the house is just like he’d expect from the living room: museum-quality furnishings under portraits that probably belonged in a museum, fake flowers on tables, plush rug running down the hallway.

Clarke’s parents look almost exactly the same in real life as they do painted in oil.  It’s a little creepy, really (okay, a lot creepy) seeing them sitting primly on the couch together right under their painted selves.  He stops a mere few steps into the living room, unsure of how one proceeds in such situations.

Jake Griffin stands first and walks towards him, beaming, hand extended.

“You must be Bellamy.”  His voice is warmer than Bellamy had been expecting and he can see a little of Clarke in the crinkles around his eyes.  “I’m Jake, Clarke’s dad.  And this is my wife, Abby.”  He gestures behind him.  Abby Griffin swallows and stands, smoothing out a nonexistent crease in her skirt.  Bellamy is possessed by a sudden desire to make a run for it.

“Nice to meet you, sir.  Ma’am.”  He shakes Jake’s hand then Abby’s.

“You’ll have to tell us your secret, Bellamy,” Abby says to him after a silence that’s just a beat too long to be comfortable.  “We’ve been trying to get Clarke to date for years.”

“Mom,” Clarke groans.

Bellamy smiles tightly.  “I just asked, Mrs. Griffin.”

She looks him up and down.  “Take care of my daughter.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

“Okay, and we’re going,” Clarke is saying and Bellamy’s never been so thankful.  She tugs him backwards out of the room calling, “Bye, Mom, bye, Dad!” one her shoulder and then they’re out the door and it’s closing behind them and Bellamy feels like he can breathe.

They don’t speak until they’re in Bellamy’s car and he’s started the engine.

“Sorry,” she says and the apology in her voice makes his heart ache.

“Don’t be,” he tells her and swivels around in his seat to back out of her ridiculous driveway.  “We can’t help our parents.”

Her wide smile is thankful and Bellamy feels the remaining tension drain out of his body.  It doesn’t matter, he knows, as, out of the corner of his eye, he watches Clarke roll down the window, hair streaming back in the wind, how potentially crazy Clarke’s mom is.  At least, not if she keeps smiling at him like that.

“So where are we going?” she asks after they turn on Highway One.  “You’ve been so secretive about it.”

Bellamy smiles and adjusts his sunglasses.  “Can’t ruin the surprise now, princess.”  The nickname just slips out.  If he hadn’t been driving, he would have clapped both hands over his mouth.  Instead, he just covertly glances over to see her fighting a smile.  He turns back to the road, feeling a blossom of pride in his chest.

The highway is basically empty and they speed up the pavement, making casual small talk.  When they run out of things to talk about, they sit in companionable silence, much like the afternoon on the beach.  Clarke is an easy person to be silent with.  She keeps one hand on her thigh and the other elbow wedged in between the side of the door and the bottom of the window, fingers looped loosely around the hand grip mounted to the ceiling.  Bellamy feels a jolt in his heart at how well she fits in his car.

He chides himself.  This is their second date, he reminds himself.  And this girl is ridiculously out of his league.  He has to stop himself from thinking things like that before it’s too late.

The “Entering City of Portland” sign flashes by on their right and Clarke smiles at it.

“Why, Bellamy Blake,” she says slyly.  “Are you taking me to the big city?”

He grins.  “Portland is hardly the big city.”

Her smile falters a little.

“But we’ll go.  To a real city.”  He chances a look over at her.  Her expression is unreadable.  “Boston?”

Her smile widens again.  “A whole other state?  Wow, aren’t we getting fancy.”

He chuckles.  “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, Clarke,” he tells her quietly.

He forces himself to look her in the eye.  Her gaze is intense.  “And I’ll go anywhere with you.”

Bellamy swallows. “Even Canada,” he jokes.

Clarke laughs.  “You have a problem with Canada?”

“I’ve never been.”

He clicks on his turn signal for the exit and slows down.

“Shame.  It’s beautiful.”

_ “So are you,” _ he wants to say.  But doesn’t.

Instead he just smiles at her, content with her answering grin and slides into an open parking spot, cutting the engine.

Her eyes are already looking past him to the stately and towering brownstone across the street. Her mouth is open in the smallest of O’s and Bellamy internally pats himself on the back.

“The Victoria Mansion?” she asks.  “How did you…?”

“I may have done a little bit of stalking,” he admits and her laugh sounds choked, sudden, unexpected.  “I schmoozed one of the local librarians into letting me see your check out history.  It was a short jump from there.”

Clarke chokes on a laugh, her eyes incredulous.  “I think that’s illegal.”

He shrugs helplessly but she’s smiling now.  “Thank you, Bellamy.  Really.”  She pauses, looks across the street again.  “I’ve never been but I’ve always wanted to go.”

Then she’s opening her door and ducking out and he’s following, jogging across the street to catch up with her just in time to still the hand that’s reaching for her wallet.

“Don’t even think about it,” he warns.

“I’m not one of those girls, Bellamy.”

“I know.”

Her eyes narrow but she zips her bag back shut.  “I’m footing the next bill.”

He laughs.  “All right.”

He slides the bills across the counter to the attendant and she passes back two tickets, smiling brightly.  “Enjoy your stay.”

Clarke beams at her and wedges her arm through Bellamy’s elbow as they turn away, stepping through the first door into a foyer, opulently decorated, and Clarke freezes.

“Wow,” she breathes, and tilts her head back.

Victorian has never been Bellamy’s style.  He’s always been more of a Craftsman-type of guy but there’s no denying that the mansion’s proprietors had been willing to spare no expense.  The floor was covered in wall-to-wall luxurious carpeting, the railing of the second level above their head was carved with the skill of a master, and the  _ art _ .

He allows Clarke to tug him into the next room, following her quietly, taking in the pure splendor around them.

“Crazy that something this beautiful only took two years to build,” he says wonderingly, as his eyes rake over a portrait of a young woman, sheathed carefully behind glass, safe from the wandering fingers of tourists.

They step into the dining room and Clarke pulls away to study the wall’s woodwork.  Bellamy joins his hands behind his back and walks around the table, set with lavish settings for a dinner party that would never sit there.  He’s certain that each of those plats costs more than his car.

“The wealth,” he starts, “it’s…” then trails off because Clarke’s looking at him with a small line in between her eyebrows.  He shakes himself.  He’d forgotten, for a moment, who he was talking to.  The Griffins might not have been  _ this  _ rich but they had much more money than Bellamy would ever be able to dream of.  To her, this must have looked reachable, like something that could be achieved if only she applied herself hard enough.  But for Bellamy, it was as out of reach as the stars.

“A bit ridiculous?” she supplies and his relief feels like a breaking wave.

“Yeah.”

She grins.  “You don’t think that just because my parents have more money than they know what to do with, I’m the same way, do you?”

He swallows.

“I’m not going to lie, Bellamy,” she says as she leads through an antechamber into the library, “the money is definitely nice.  But it makes people into assholes.”  She looks back at him.  “I don’t want to be an asshole.”

Bellamy watches her crane her head back, eyes tracing along the spines of the books, soaring high into the rafters.  The light streaming in through the windows arcs across the bright yellow of her dress, glinting off the gold of her hair, and Bellamy’s mouth goes dry.   _ Fuck me _ , he thinks,  _ I’d follow you into hell _ .

 

They spill down the steps of the museum three hours later, smiling and laughing.  Somehow Clarke’s hand found its way into Bellamy’s, and his skin is warm against hers.  She tightens her grip as they stop on the sidewalk, worried for the sparest of moments that he’ll let go.  Instead, he slants her that smile that sends her heart racing and squeezes back.

“You like fish and chips?” he asks and it’s such a mundane question but the happy ball in Clarke burns impossibly brighter.

“Beer battered?”

He gives her a sideways look.  “I don’t even know what that means?”

She laughs and ducks her head.  “Yeah, I like fish and chips.”

He grins.  “Great.  There’s supposed to be a great place a few blocks away down by the water.

Bellamy’s “great place” turns out to be a wooden shack at the end of wharf with a hand-painted sign and staff of lounging teenagers who look like they’d rather be anywhere else.  The whole thing looks like it could be blown over in the next big gust of wind.

Clarke gives him a sideways look, one eyebrow crooked.

“It has great reviews on Yelp?” he offers.

She laughs.  “It certainly is the definition of hole in the wall,” she offers.

“You trying to make me feel better?  Because it’s not working.”

“I’m buying,” she tells him and effortlessly slides in front of the counter before he has a chance to protest.  She scans the menu quickly and orders two two piece cod and chips.

“Is cod better than halibut?” he asks her when she returns to his side, tucking her change back into her wallet.

“I think so.  It’s moister,” she adds.

“Uh-huh,” he says in that slightly dumbfounded way that means he’s completely out of his depth.

Clarke resists the urge to ruffle his hair.  “You’ll like it.”

“I already knew that from Yelp.”

Their order appears at the counter and Clarke goes to get it.  He follows, taking one of the trays.

“Do you have any malt vinegar?” she asks the cashier and he wordlessly hands her a bottle.  “Thanks,” she smiles.

“A connoisseur,” he jokes.

“It takes them to the next level,” she tells him seriously.  “You should try it.”

He rolls his eyes but takes the bottle from her when she’s done, shaking it once over his fries.  The look of surprise that dawns over his face makes Clarke smile.

“Told you.”

“No reason to be a jerk about it,” he grumbles, upending it over the basket.

She hums and pops another fry into her mouth.

“I’m having a great time today,” she tells him honestly.

His lips jerk up in half a smile.  “So am I.”

Clarke smiles and scoots closer to him, so their thighs just brush and looks out over the crashing waves.  She briefly leans her head against his shoulder and his fingers brush against her forearm.  Tingles race down her arm and, for the first time since she met him, she allows herself to wonder: at the odds of finding someone like Bellamy, down to earth and honest, in a town so full of people who lie like it’s their religion.

 

After lunch Clarke directs him to a park in the northern part of the city.

“There’s a nice trail around the water,” she says, pointing out at the calm water of Back Cove.  “If you want to walk?”

Bellamy slides his hand back into hers, feeling gratified when her fingers weave with his instantly.  “Or we could sit?” he suggests, gesturing to a bench a mere steps from the shore.

“I like sitting,” is her response and he stifles a laugh.

She folds herself onto the bench, one heel up on the bench, clutched to her chest.  She rests her chin on it and looks out at the water.  Bellamy watches, gears clicking in his mind.

“You like the water, don’t you,” he says, more of a statement than a question.

She turns her head towards him, the light of surprise in her eyes.  “I do.”  A pause.  “I’ve always lived near it.  On the Cape, here.”  She looks back.  “It touches something in me.  Makes me feel at home.”

He hums.

“You have a lot of water at home in Virginia?”

He shakes his head.  “No, we’re too far inland.  I’ve always liked the ocean though.  It’s peaceful.”

“Easy,” she muses.

He looks over at her.  She smiles but it’s a strained look.

“I think that’s why I like being with you so much,” she adds, so quiet he thinks he didn’t hear properly.

“I’m sorry?”

“You don’t want anything from me,” she continues, voice getting a bit stronger.

“What would I want from you?”  He’s dumbfounded.

She shrugs, loops her arm more securely around her knee.  “For me to be the same as them?  To be my mother?  To go to med school and find a frat president boyfriend to marry and buy a house in the suburbs and have two kids with?  Fuck, Bellamy, I don’t know.”  Her voice cracks and something in Bellamy rips open.  How could they have done this to her?  A girl so full of light and magic and joy, reduced to this self-doubting shell.

“Clarke,” he whispers, reaching out to rest a hand on her shoulder.  She jerks and he almost pulls away but she relaxes into his touch just as quickly.

Her laugh sounds a bit manic.  “I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be,” he answers softly.  “I’ve only been in that town for a few weeks and it’s already driving me up the wall.”

She looks over and there’s something else in her eyes entirely — relief.

“How did I get lucky enough to find you?” she whispers, voice choke full of wonder.

Bellamy feels as though his smile is going to split his face open.  “I don’t know.  But I’m glad you did.”

“Me, too,” she sighs, leaning into his side, foot dropping to the sidewalk, head firmly on his shoulder.  He smiles out at the water, waves rocking quietly into the shore, and wraps an arm around her shoulder.  She fit perfectly.

 

Clarke comes over for dinner four nights later.

They’ve been texting since their date but he hasn’t actually  _ seen _ her.  He’s been busy unpacking the boxes that finally arrived from Virginia and apparently she’d been dragged into some sort of fundraiser hosted by her mother.  And it sounds absolutely ridiculous and crazy but he  _ missed  _ her, a girl he’d only known for a matter of weeks.

He was straightening the pillows on his bed for what was probably the fifteenth time when Octavia pushed open the door to his room.  She took one look at him and sighed.

“She’s not going to be coming into your room, Bell, Jesus.”  She pauses.  “At least, I would hope you have more decency than that.”

He just glares at her.

“Her car just pulled into the driveway,” his sister says before disappearing back down the hallway.

Bellamy just sighs.

Even after he’d insisted to her multiple times over the last few days that Clarke wasn’t like the rest of Kennebunkport’s resident rich asshole population, O still wasn’t sold.  She was too protective of him, too worried that Clarke was going to get bored and dump his ass, leaving the pieces scattered behind her as she ran off to have three and a half perfect children with a trust funder husband.

Bellamy was trying very hard to convince himself that her doing such a thing wouldn’t break him in half.

But as he thundered down the stairs, he had to admit that maybe, he’s a little bit wrong.  Because Clarke is standing in his foyer exactly like the first time, smiling at Aurora, the light bouncing off her hair just so…

Yeah, O’s right, he’s royally fucked.

“Would you pass the potatoes, please, Clarke?”  Octavia’s voice is too sickly sweet.  Bellamy aims to kick her under the table and misses.  He’ll have to take to her about her table manners later.

God bless her, Clarke passes the bowl with a smile on her face before answering Aurora’s question about college.

“Well, my mom wants me to go to med school.”  She shrugs.

“A doctor,” Aurora muses, “that’s a difficult path.  But rewarding, I’m sure.”

Clarke barely manages to suppress her grimace.  “So my mom keeps telling me.”

Bellamy watches as Octavia’s eyes narrow as her head tilts.  Her eyes catch his and she makes a face.  He laughs into his place and covers it with a sip of water.  Aurora’s eyes flick to him and she shakes her head.

“At least you have some idea of what you want to do,” she continues.  “Bellamy here is still wandering aimlessly down his own academic path.”

He splutters.  Octavia chokes on her next bite.

“I am not  _ wandering _ ,” he protests.  “I’m taking a year to figure out what I want to do.”

Aurora smiles gently and pats his hand.  “I’m not condemning your choice, sweetie.”

“Uh-huh,” he grumbles.

When he looks up slightly he notices Clarke smiling down at her chicken as she cuts it and his heart tugs again.

_ 100% screwed _ , he thinks.

At the end of the meal, Clarke automatically stands and, despite Aurora’s protestations, starts clearing plates.  Between her, Bellamy, and Octavia, the dishes are in the dishwasher in minutes and Aurora is shooing them out of the kitchen.

“Roof?” Octavia asks him as they’re climbing the stairs.

He hesitates and she shoots a look over his shoulder at Clarke, a few steps below him.  

Octavia rolls her eyes.  “You like star gazing, Clarke?”

Bellamy almost trips over the next step.

“Sure,” comes her easy answer and Octavia’s wide and real answering smile sets right something he didn’t realize was even wrong.

They clamber out through Bellamy’s window (he’ll be making a point to Octavia about how he needed to straighten his pillows after all later) and settle on the roof.  It’s a relatively small space and it fits Bellamy and O comfortably but with the addition of Clarke, they’re a tight fit.  Bellamy ends up squeezed between the two girls, their feet stretched out almost to the gutter.

“This view is incredible,” Clarke says and she tips her head back to take in the sky.

He’s staring, he knows it, but he still can’t hold in his grunt when Octavia elbows him in the gut.  He looks at her sheepishly but she just shakes her head and mouths, “whipped” at him.

“Bell and I started doing this when our parents started fighting a lot,” Octavia’s saying and Bellamy’s suddenly not sure if he’s awake.

But he couldn’t imagine that sad glint in Clarke’s eyes, the one that says she knows deep down what it feels like to need to escape.

“Divorced?” she asks softly and Octavia nods, not taking her eyes off the rippling water.

“That’s why we were able to move up here,” she adds.  “The money,” she clarifies.  “Turns out good old Dad had a lot more of it than he was letting on.  But Mom’s lawyers dug it up just fine.”

“At least he’s out of your life,” Clarke says, and there’s a bitterness in her voice that made Bellamy do a double take.

“What are you talking about?” he asks her.

“My parents didn’t get along too well five years ago,” she began slowly.  “Fighting all the time, Dad slept on the couch most nights.  That sort of thing.”  She takes a deep shaky breath and Bellamy puts his hand on her shoulder, just lightly.  She leans into the touch and continues.  “Then he got cancer.”

“ _ Shit _ ,” Octavia mumbles.

“Suddenly all my mom could talk about was how  _ brave _ he was and how this was an important time for  _ family _ to stand by his side and to stay  _ united _ .”  A dry laugh.  “I’m not sure where that sentiment was when she was hurling their wedding china at his head.”

Bellamy thinks back to that austere family portrait hanging over the mantel, the tension that was barely there, just under the surface, ready to erupt.

“Well, you lot are good fakers,” Octavia adds.

Bellamy’s ready to do damage control when Clarke stiffens next to him but when he looks over she’s just staring at Octavia with a shocked look on her face.  Octavia stares defiantly back.

“O…” he says quietly.

“No, Bellamy,” Clarke interjects.  “She’s right.  We are.”  She looks back out at the water and the tension drains out of her.  “And I think I’ve gotten so good at it myself that sometimes I forget.”

He walks her out to her car later, after night has long since fallen and the stars have come out, shining down on the golden circlet of Clarke’s hair, and even Octavia had warmed up to her enough to take that biting tone out of her voice every time she spoke to the other girl.

She takes him by surprise there at the end of his driveway, throwing her arms around him in a tight hug that’s almost over before he recovers himself enough to hug her back and he takes the briefest of moments to inhale the flowery scent of her shampoo.  Then she’s pulling away and smiling at him in this shy way that makes his heart beat too fast and his mouth go dry and she’s saying, “See you soon?” in this hesitant voice and he’s never wanted to kiss anyone so badly in his life.

And what a dumb question.  Because Bellamy Blake couldn’t pull himself away from Clarke Griffin if he tried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading and I'll see y'all on Saturday! Please drop me a comment if you liked the chapter or visit me on [Tumblr!](http://andrevvminyard.tumblr.com)


	4. Chapter 4

The wind is whipping through her hair and the sun is bright on her face.  The leather of the steering wheel burns almost too hot against the skin of her palm but her other hand is warmer, tangled around Bellamy’s fingers on her console.  The road winds ahead of them, not quite empty but open with possibilities.

“You just want to show me off in a bathing suit, don’t you,” he teases from the passenger seat and his wide smile is infectious.

“I don’t even know what you look like in a bathing suit,” she shoots back.  “This could be a horrible disaster on my part.”

“Oh, what, you going to break up with me if I don’t meet your standards?”

She glances away from the road just long enough to flash him a joking smile. “Maybe.”  But she squeezes his hand so he knows she’s just kidding and his smile widens as he links their fingers even closer.

She turns her gaze back to the road, chest full almost to the bursting.

_ This _ , Clarke Griffin thinks,  _ must be heaven _ .

 

Bellamy has never liked beaches much.  They’re always too crowded and too much about showing off and sand always  _ gets everywhere _ .  But nevertheless when Clarke said she wanted to take him to her favorite beach he agreed because he’s a sap and there’s probably nothing he wouldn’t do if she asked him.  He even told himself that maybe he’d like it but when Clarke pulls onto a beachfront road in Hampton, New Hampshire, he’s taken aback by the floods of people.

“It gets busy,” she says apologetically, slowing a bit so she can scan better for a parking spot.  “It’s become a really big tourist destination in recent years.”

“Uh-huh,” he manages.

“The beach is massive though,” she continues, as she seamlessly slides into reverse and swivels him her seat to back into a space.  “Lots of room.  I promise.”  She turns off the car and winks at him.

Damn her, she’d known all along.

“Did Octavia tell you I hate beaches?” he demands as he opens his door and gets out.

She laughs.  “Maybe.”  But there’s a glint in her eye that gives her away.

“I think I liked things more when she didn’t like you,” he grumbles and she just grins.

“You’re a big fat liar, Bell.  Now come on I want to get a good spot.”

Beaches are great, Bellamy decides later.  Because beaches have Clarke in a bikini and he’s pretty sure he’s never seen anything like it.

“You’re staring,” she tells him later and he grins at her.

“So are you.”

And it’s true, he thinks, as her cheeks redden.  Bellamy has never been one of those “go to the gym and get buff” kind of guys but that’s not to say he’s not in shape.  He runs sometimes and after their dad left he was the one who started doing most of the stuff around the house like screwing in lightbulbs and cleaning the gutters and putting up Christmas lights.

“Hard not to,” she replies shamelessly and that sends off his own blush.

She scoots a bit closer and he puts an arm around her, noting how warm her skin is.

“You’re not going to burn are you?” he asks.

In answer she just waves a bottle of sunscreen in his face.  “We eternally white people do have our safety measures, Bellamy,” she tells him crossly and he laughs, squeezes her shoulder.

“I was just kidding.”

“Uh-huh. Right.”

But she leans into him anyway and puts her head on his shoulder.

“Thank you for coming with me today,” she mumbles and he squeezes her again.

“Trouble at home?”

She’s quiet for a long moment then nods wordlessly into his shoulder.

This is what he’d been expecting.  Most of the time they’d spent together had been at their various houses or sitting out on the sand behind Clarke’s house.  They were usually left alone and just talked, knees pressed against each other, hands woven together, with the occasional exception of Octavia who, after Clarke had come over for dinner that first time, had warmed up to her significantly.  And Bellamy could tell that Clarke liked having her around.

It was because they spent so much time around home that a flashing alarm always went off in Bellamy’s head when Clarke asked him to go somewhere with him.  It meant that she needed to get away from Abby, that she needed to forget, if only for a little while, the person she had to be at home.

“What is it this time?” he asks.

Clarke pulls her head off his shoulder but doesn’t move away.  “Brown.”

He sighs.  School had been one of the very first things that had come up during their fledgling relationship.  Clarke had told him everything—that her mom wanted her to go to med school and become some kind of hot shot doctor and move to New York and vacation i the Hamptons with her rich husband who worked on Wall Street or somewhere equally posh and cutthroat.

“She wants me to be her,” she’d concluded bitterly and Bellamy had never hated Abby Griffin more than in that moment.

“What’d she do?” Bellamy asks softly, running a hand down her arm in a motion that he knew helped her relax.

“I told her that I was thinking about taking some time off,” Clarke began.  “Maybe to go traveling or something.  Or work.  And she  _ laughed _ at me.  Said that people like me didn’t do things like that.”  She pauses.  “That they were for  _ other people _ .”

Bellamy bristles.  Other people like him, he knows that’s what Abby meant.  She’d never said anything overtly classist to him but he knew how she felt deep down.  And he’s sure that she’d said things to Clarke about him that Clarke was trying to keep hidden.

“And?”

“And what, Bell?”

“And what are you going to do?”

She shrugs helplessly.  “I don’t know what I  _ can _ do.  I mean, right?”

He looks at her, takes in the desperation, the anxiety.  “You can do whatever you want, Clarke,” he tells her honestly.  “That’s one of the best parts about being you.”

 

She can’t stop thinking about what he said to her the whole way home.  They’re both quiet, content to sit in silence, drunk off each other’s touch.

Clarke had never allowed herself to dream of what she wanted.  It had always been “this is what you’ll do, this is how you’ll make us proud.”  And for a long time that had been enough.  But now the thought of majoring in pre-med and going to medical school and moving into some posh apartment in the Upper East Side made her chafe at the bit.  Because that future was exactly what she’d been doing her whole life and even if she hadn’t realized it, the sheltered feeling she’d grown up with had never been enough to make her feel happy and fulfilled.  And it hadn’t been until she’d met Bellamy and allowed herself to go out on a limb a little bit with a man who was so unlike her and from a world so different from her own, that she’d realized that what she was hungering after was the unknown,  _ adventure _ .

But what would she do?  If she didn’t go to Brown, if she didn’t follow the carefully set out path that she’d had since she was in elementary school, what would she do?  Where would she go?

She opens her mouth to ask but remembers the look on Bellamy’s face earlier when she’d first brought up her confusion, the bewilderment of someone who has never had their life decided for them, who has always viewed the future as a never-ending parade of unopened doors, with delights and fancies and experiences waiting behind each one.

Bellamy was Clarke’s first door.  The first one that she’d opened without the express permission of her parents or some other authority figure, the only one whose contents hadn’t been vetted first.  And knowing that gave her a thrill for the future, and a burning desire to open more and more.  But she didn’t even know how to begin.  And something told her that Bellamy wasn’t the right person to ask.

She drops him off in his driveway and he hugs her, kissing her cheek lightly and saying he’ll see her the next day for the annual Kennebunkport Boating Regatta, one of Clarke’s least favorite events.  She smiles and watches him unlock the front door and slip inside.  Then she pulls out her phone and texts Octavia.

She meets the younger girl at a park half a mile away.  They sit side by side on the top of a picnic table, Octavia twirling her keys aimlessly around her finger.

“Did you and my brother have a nice time at the beach?” she asks finally.

Clarke nods.

“Did…are you guys okay?”

“Yeah, we’re fine.  I just…don’t know if this is something I can talk to him about.”  She looks over at Octavia and the concern in the other girl’s eyes force her to look away again.

“Your mom,” Octavia guesses, her voice dry.

Clarke chokes on a laugh.  “Isn’t it always?”

Another long silence.

“Why me, Clarke?  I mean, Bellamy’s thick as a tree most of the time but he’s always good at giving advice.”

“You know how my mom wants me to go to med school, right?”

“And change your name to Abby Griffin, Jr.?  Yeah, of course.”

“Well, I was talking to Bell about it earlier and…he told me to just pick another path for myself.  Only I don’t know how to do that.  And the look in your brother’s eye when I told him that…” She trails off, shakes her head.

Octavia nods and a shadow crosses her face.  “Bellamy’s always been the go out and get them type.  I don’t think he gets how someone could so blindly follow in the footsteps of another person, especially if they don’t want to.” Octavia fixes her in a stare so intense that Clarke can’t look away.  “Do you want to be your mother, Clarke?”

And the worst part is that Clarke doesn’t have an answer.

 

The Kennebunkport Boating Regatta or, as Bellamy preferred to think of it, “I’d Rather Stick Forks In My Eyes Event,” was an annual to-do chock full of high society types in their best clothes, gossiping about each other behind hands aided by too much champagne.  Or at least, that’s what Clarke had told him about it, and he certainly wasn’t looking forward to it.

It’s held at the River Club and Bellamy feels a small chill run over him as he walks through the door of the ballroom, where the festivities will soon start.  His eyes are immediately drawn to the corner where he’d first seen Clarke, looking bored and uncomfortable in a circle of Abby and her friends.  But Clarke isn’t there now, and she had told him last night before they went to sleep that she was probably going to be late.  She had important things to do, she’d said, and a petty part of Bellamy had wondered what was more important that saving him from the approaching train wreck that his presence at this sort of event would likely illicit.

Because despite the casseroles, Aurora Blake and her children hadn’t really been accepted into the community.  Perhaps it was like Octavia had said, that they could sniff out outsiders and knew that they were different.  But it didn’t really matter.  Not when Aurora is being whisked off by a gaggle of high society housewives with barely a look in his and Octavia’s direction, giggling already like schoolgirls.

“I think I hate this place,” Octavia tells him and he doesn’t even have it in him to protest.

Because if it wasn’t for Clarke, he thinks he would hate it, too.

She appears by his side, panting slightly and full of apologies two hours later, when Bellamy and Octavia have escaped to the deck in avoidance of their probing next door neighbor who seems entirely unable to take a hint.

“Hey,” she says, smiling breathlessly at him, and he’s struck a little breathless.  She’s wearing an anchor-printed dress (Abby’s doing, he’s sure, but it looks great on her nonetheless), that’s just bordering the edge between flirty and something more.  And, with her hair swept up and shining in the summer sun, she looks almost too beautiful.

“Hey,” he replies.

“Having fun?”

“Oh, so much.”

He loves her laugh, he thinks, as she leans against the railing next to him and bumps his shoulder.

“Gross,” Octavia mutters from his other side as she returns with two Cokes.  He reaches for one but she yanks it out of reach, handing it to Clarke instead.  “Nuh-uh, big brother, she asked nicely when I passed her inside.”

He rolls his eyes.

“I’ll let you have a little,” Clarke tells him.  “Maybe.”

Now he’s the on bumping her shoulder.  “This was a calculated effort, I see.”

“Hardly,” Octavia scoffs.  “Your karma must just be bad.”

That gets a laugh out of Clarke and Bellamy grins.

“Clarke!” Abby’s voice calls from inside.  “Clarke, where are you?”

Clarke’s sigh is loud and long.

“You guys make up?” Bellamy asks lowly.

“Kind of,” Clarke mutters.  “In the, we talked but not really because all she did was lecture at me about the importance of higher education and going to a college ‘worthy of my intellect.’  Then she hugged me and told me to go do the dishes.”

Bellamy groans.

“Anyway,” Clarke continues.  “I’d better go.  I’ll catch you later?”

He nods and she leans up to kiss his cheek, disappearing back inside.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Octavia says, wordlessly offering him her coke as he knew she would.  “That even with a mother that neurotic and insane Clarke turned out all right?”

He’s got half a mind to shush her.  There’s a group of housewives within hearing distance but they’re all so tipsy of the free champagne that he doubts they can even hear themselves think.  Instead he just nods and searches for Clarke through the paned glasses of the windows.

“Yeah,” he says faintly.  “It is pretty amazing.”

She finds him again, this time by the refreshments table, thirty minutes later.  Octavia had disappeared earlier, having run off with a friend he didn’t know she had.

“Hey, again,” she says softly, leaning into him for a brief second.  “Sorry for running off earlier.”

“No,” he tells her, “it’s okay.  I get it.”

Her smile is weak.

“Is she…less angry?”

Clarke shrugs.  “No.  But that’s nothing new.  She’s been in a constant state of annoyance at me for one thing or another for years now.”

Bellamy winces and suppresses the comment he wants to make.  Past conversations like this have taught him that they won’t do any good.

“The race is going to start soon,” she tells him, grabbing his hand and pulling him away from the deck. “We should go get a good spot.”

Bellamy thought that he understood Clarke.  He thought that somewhere amid those afternoons turning to evening spent on the beach and those car rides to nowhere, just winding along Maine’s woodland roads and the nights on his roof, he’d started to piece her together.  But now, standing with Clarke watching the rowers speed past as she laughs at something Abby just said, he’s not sure.

But she’s reaching for his hand and squeezing it and he loves that look in her eye more than life, the bright one that promises they’ve got all the days in the world.  And even if he doesn’t know her just yet, he will.  He’s sure of it.

 

Bellamy lets her in later that night with a wide smile and whispered greeting of, “hey, you made it.”

She lifts up the bag of her hand in offering and his grin widens.  “I brought ice cream?”

“You are the best girlfriend ever.”

She feels her cheeks flush.  “Your mom here?”

“Why?  You planning on stealing my virtue?”

She rolls her eyes.  “Please.”

“To the roof?” he asks, eyebrows raised.

“To the roof.”

The night is still, the air calm.  The only sound is the crash of waves on the beach.  Clarke closes her eyes and leans back a little, and this high up she almost manages to convince herself that she’s flying.

“You looked beautiful at the regatta today,” Bellamy tells her, voice a little low like he’s nervous.

She tries and fails to hide her smile.  “And I liked your Sperry’s.”  She nudges his ankle with her foot.  “You looked very local.”

He answers with a snort.  “That was by no means my intention.” He pauses.  “Octavia told me I looked like a clown.”

“I will admit, the pastels weren’t really working for you.  The next time you want to go to Vineyard Vines, I’ll come with you.”

He laughs and Clarke grins, opening her eyes again.  He’s looking over at her, the light off the lampposts in the street below just barely reflecting off his eyes, but to Clarke they look like stars.  She reaches up, runs a finger across his cheek, feeling more than seeing him shudder at the touch.

“It looks like you have stars in your eyes,” she whispers.

His hand comes up to wrap around her fingers, holding them to his cheek. “If I do it’s only because you put them there,” he whispers back, voice husky.

Her heart is in her throat, there are butterflies in her stomach, and she can’t breathe.  Clarke has been alone with Bellamy countless times since she’d met him but not like this, never like this.  Not once has she felt like if she stops touching him she’ll die.  He leans forward slowly until they’re so close all she can see is a small patch of freckles on his nose.  His breath ghosts across her lips and they part, almost unconsciously.

And then, in the next heartbeat, they’re pressed against his, soft and gentle and yet so much all at once.  His lips are soft under hers, softer than she’d been expecting, and he tastes vaguely of mint.  Bellamy’s hand slides from hers over his cheek to her hair, ghosting across the strands, following them to her shoulder.  His thumb brushes against bare skin and she shivers, sliding closer.

And that’s the dam breaking.  There’s a gasp.  Maybe it was her, maybe it was him but it doesn’t matter.  What does is that Clarke is in his lap, the ice cream she brought and the spoons he retrieved from the kitchen long forgotten at their side.  Her arms around his neck, fingers digging into his shoulders, and his are on her cheeks, holding her in place as if she could ever pull herself away.

He’s smiling when he pulls away and she chases his mouth, leaning against his chest.

“What?” she demands when he turns his head so her lips brush against his cheekbone, feverish against her skin.

“Nothing,” he says, brushing a strand of her hair behind her ear.  His eyes are brighter than before, alive with an energy that makes her giddy.  “I just realized I’d never kissed you.”

“Well, thank you for remedying that,” she smiles, leaning in closer again and his breath hitches.  “I’m glad you did.”

“So am I,” he manages before she seals her mouth over his again.  And then there’s no more talking.  There’s just Clarke.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading and please drop me a comment if you liked the chapter or visit me on [Tumblr!](http://andrevvminyard.tumblr.com)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She chews on her lip. “I just get less and less excited about Brown every day.” She looks up at him and her blue eyes look like storm tossed seas. “I don’t even think I want to go anymore.”
> 
> He guides her to the couch in the living room and pushes her down. “Because of Abby?”
> 
> “Don’t get me wrong,” she says, voice bitter, “it’d bring me a lot of joy to not go just to stick it to her. But no, it’s not even that. I don’t want to go.” She stops suddenly and sits frozen.
> 
> “Clarke?” he asks quietly.
> 
> “I just,” she manages. “I’ve never said something like that before and really meant it..”
> 
> Bellamy feels his brow wrinkling. “Like what?”
> 
> “Like something about me. About what I really want. You know?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow I so apologize for how late this chapter is being posted, I almost forgot it was Wednesday, it’s been a whirlwind of a week. But here we go! (I like to think of this chapter as when shit starts gettin’ real)

Kissing Bellamy was simultaneously the best and worst decision Clarke has ever made.

The best because a) Bellamy is a great kisser and b) she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about it since she first laid eyes on his across that crowded event space.

But it’s also the worst, and that’s because it quickly becomes clear to both of them that now that they’ve jumped that chasm, there’s nothing they’d rather be doing.

She’s struggling through one of Abby’s near-constant speeches about how charity is important and how she needs Clarke to pick a cause to devote herself to that summer.  Last summer it had been tutoring elementary schoolers.  The summer before that recycling.  And before that, something about wildlife rehabilitation.  Clarke knew that Abby only dragged her into these things because they made her look even better and because she liked giving interviews about how charity had brought them together as a family and blah blah blah.

Abby was going on about beachfront cleanup and organizing a town-wide effort but Clarke was barely listening, too busy tracing her finger across her hip, remembering how it had felt to have Bellamy’s hands there just last night, burning hot against her bare skin.

_ “You’re beautiful _ ,” he’d breathed into the hollow under her collar bone and Clarke had never felt more alive.

“Clarke, are you even listening to me?” Abby demands and Clarke snaps herself out of it.

She bites back her, “no” and just smiles. “Of course.”

Abby’s look is wary but it’s enough to get her to go on, and Clarke slips right back into her daydream as Bellamy laughs against her neck and her fingers dig even deeper into his hair.

She agrees to help Abby at a food bank a couple towns over and is granted permission to leave.  She dashes up the stairs to her room before her mom remembers some other charity ball she needs Clarke to go to.  She’d become increasingly nasty about Clarke dating since it became clear that Bellamy wasn’t just a fling and the constant backhanded comments about needing a partner with a future was starting to drive Clarke insane.

She flops back on her bed and stares up at the ceiling, arms crossed over her stomach.  The afternoon sun is just starting to slant in through her open window and its heat barely grazes her arm, making it tingle.  She tilts her head and the calendar on her wall catches her eye.  Glaring red x’s, carefully marked out by Clarke’s steady hand every night, stare back at her.  She feels something dark settling in the pit of her stomach.  It’s hard to believe that the summer is already half over, that in just over a month, she’ll be expected to go back to the Cape, and pretend that she had just another refreshing summer, chasing locals and getting tan.  Not that Clarke had ever chased locals.

The inevitable day that she and Bellamy had to part is something that they’ve managed to avoid talking about.  Abby has mentioned it once or twice but Clarke’s answering icy glare has quickly diverted the conversation.  And as far as Clarke knows, Aurora hasn’t mentioned it to Bellamy. Not that it matters.  Clarke knows the statistics, knows that these summer romance type things never last.  But she and Bellamy aren’t a statistic.  And Massachusetts and Virginia aren’t that far apart, not really.  They’ll make it, she knows it.

Her phone vibrates on her bed and she smiles, tipping over to read the screen.

_ Bell: you want to get dinner tonight? _

Clarke’s grin widens and she types out a quick affirmation.  Dinner and maybe a long walk down the beach with Bellamy sounds much better than sitting through an awkward and full of tension meal with her parents.

“Clarke!” Abby yells from downstairs.  “Mail for you!”

Clarke peels herself off her bed and goes to the door, leaning over the banister. “What is it?”

Abby waves a thick envelope at her.  “It’s from Brown.”

The hole in the bottom of Clarke’s stomach from earlier digs itself down another few feet.

“Oh?” she asks, and prides herself that her voice doesn’t sound too strangled.

Abby wiggles the envelope again.  Clarke goes down the stairs and takes it from her.

“Oh, and I’m going out with Bellamy tonight,” Clarke says in an off hand sort of way.

It’s a testament to the letter from Brown that Abby does nothing other than narrow her eyes and disappear into the living room.

Clarke’s heart is beating too hard against her rib cage and she looks down the thick envelope in her hands.  She’s possessed by a sudden and deep urge to throw it, as hard as she can, but instead, she steels herself, tightening her fingers around the edges and making herself breathe deep.

“It’s okay, Clarke,” she whispers.  “It’s just college.”

 

“I got my registration packet for classes this afternoon,” Clarke tells him by way of greeting as she slides past him into the house.

Normally Bellamy would make some kind of off-hand sarcastic remark but he knows Clarke well enough by now to see the way she’s hiding her face and how her voice is purposefully neutral.  He just reaches for her wrist and twists her around.

“That’s good, right?”

She chews on her lip.  “I just get less and less excited about Brown every day.”  She looks up at him and her blue eyes look like storm tossed seas. “I don’t even think I want to go anymore.”

He guides her to the couch in the living room and pushes her down.  “Because of Abby?”

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says, voice bitter, “it’d bring me a lot of joy to not go just to stick it to her.  But no, it’s not even that.   _ I  _ don’t want to go.”  She stops suddenly and sits frozen.

“Clarke?” he asks quietly.

“I just,” she manages.  “I’ve never said something like that before and really  _ meant _ it..”

Bellamy feels his brow wrinkling.  “Like what?”

“Like something about  _ me _ .  About what  _ I _ really want.  You know?”

Bellamy bites his lip, reaches out to touch her hair, softly, brushing his fingers against it.  She’s looking back at him, so honest and open, and it breaks his heart, that this girl, so beautiful inside and out, has ever been made to feel like she didn’t matter.

“Then don’t go,” he says finally and something behind her eyes breaks.

He holds his breath, waiting for the backlash that always comes when he proposes this.  Waits for Clarke to tell him that it’s not that easy, that he just doesn’t understand.  Instead, she looks away, and her hands are balled into white-knocked fists in her lap.  He brushes his free hand across her knuckles and whispers, “Hey, Clarke, it’s going to be okay.  All right?  No matter what you do and where you go, it’s going to be all right.”

She looks back at him and there are unshed tears shining in the corners of her eyes.  “Where did you even come from?”

“A very small house in Alexandria, Virginia that doesn’t have fully-functional plumbing,” he replies dryly and she laughs.

“You’re an asshole.”

“Yes, but I’m  _ your _ asshole.”

She smiles and ducks her head into her shoulder.  “Thank you,” she mumbles into his shirt, so quietly that he barely even hears her.

He presses a kiss her her hair and squeezes her shoulder.  “Any time, princess.”

Bellamy is fairly sure there’s nothing he wouldn’t love doing as long as he was doing it with Clarke but this, the quiet sweet moments with her breath skating across his neck and her fingers loosely wrapped in his shirt, with his arm around her shoulder, and the smell of her shampoo creating a cocoon around both of them are his favorite.

Aurora had once told him that love was about peace and silence and thirteen year old Bellamy had laughed it off, too consumed with thoughts of skin and bikinis and the forbidden aisle of the drug store.  But now, with Clarke nestled into his side, trusting and open, he realizes that he knows what his mother had meant.  He presses his face into her hair and is rewarded with the feeling of her lips curving against his collarbone.

“I love you,” she whispers and he knows she didn’t say it so he would say it back.  So he doesn’t.  But he knows she can feel it in every line of his body.

“We’re going to be all right, Clarke,” he tells her and she nods.

“I know.”

And for a reason that Bellamy doesn’t want to contemplate, he feels the beginnings of tears prick in the corners of his eyes.

 

Clarke goes to the soup kitchen with Abby on Saturday, donning a stained apron and tying her hair back in the back room.  Abby’s done up even for her and Clarke has it on good authority that he mother spent an extra thirty minutes in front of the mirror that morning.  The thought makes her a little sick to her stomach.

“How’s Bellamy?” Abby asks, all nonchalantly, as she ladles out soup.

Clarke tenses immediately.  No conversation about her and Bellamy’s relationship has ever been just that.  “Fine,” she answers shortly.

Abby shoots her a quick glance.  “And his sister?  What’s her name again?”

“Octavia.”

“Right.  Interesting name.”

“Augustus’ sister,” Clarke answers automatically.  “The emperor,” she adds at Abby’s confused glance.

“Ah.”

“He likes history.”

“Is it what he wants to study?”

Clarke swallows. So this is what this particular attack was about.  College.  No doubt Abby had noticed the unopened packet from Brown, sitting on Clarke’s desk where it stared at her every night before she went to sleep, accusatory, questioning why she hadn’t opened it yet.

“He’s taking a year off,” Clarke replies, and the words taste ashy in her mouth.  She knows even before she looks over how Abby will respond.

“I see.”  The words are cold and harsh.

“He doesn’t know what he wants to do yet,” Clarke snaps back.  “It’s not like he’s going to be lazing around the corner store accepting welfare checks, Mom, he’s going to work.”

Abby looks taken aback.  “I—I didn’t—“

“Yes, you did.”

Now it’s Abby’s turn to swallow and look away.  When she speaks again her voice is timid.  “I—I’d like to get to know him better.”  A long pause.  “If that’s all right with you.”

Part of Clarke wants to say  _ no, it’s not okay, not when I know how you’ll look at him when you think I’m not watching _ just to be spiteful and see the hurt in Abby’s eyes but she tamps down the urge.  “That’d be nice,” she replies and hopes that Abby doesn’t hear the lie in her voice.

 

Bellamy’s a bit ashamed to admit that his first reaction when Clarke tells him Abby’s invited him over is to laugh.  He’s clutching his side, a little breathless, when he looks up and sees her chewing her lip, eyes serious and worried.

“You weren’t kidding?” he manages to get out and she barely shakes her head, just the smallest of side-to-side movements.

That sucks the mirth right out of him.  “Shit.”

A small smile.  “You don’t have to.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“Yes.”  Her answer is immediate, certain.

“Then I’ll be there.”

Aurora and Octavia had left that morning for an overnight girls’ trip to Portland and Bellamy had begged off, claiming that his feet were perfectly fine un-pedicured.  Now, as he stares blankly into his closet, eyes tripping over all the clothes he’s never had a problem with before, he wishes more than anything that Octavia was lying sideways across his bed, flipping through a  _ Seventeen _ making snarky comments that ultimately end up being helpful.  Instead he’s on his own.

He reaches blindly for his only pair of khakis and decides to figure his shirt out later.

He’s rushing out the door later, fingers hopelessly coming through his hair in a last ditch attempt to sort out his unruly curls when he sees that the flag’s down on the mailbox.  He curses and hurries up to it, yanking open the door and grabbing the wad of letters inside.  He throws them across the entry table in the foyer and grabs his keys, then freezes.

He frowns and leans closer to the splayed out pile of envelopes, reaching across the surface of the wood as if they intend to colonize it.  He nudges some of the top letters aside and his breath catches in his throat.

URGENT: PAST DUE trumpets the letter in bold red stenciled letters, somehow both smug and glaring.  Bellamy digs further into the pile, his movements desperate now.  There’s more red and more.  Utility bills, their cable, the mortgage.  Hell, Bellamy hadn’t even realized there was a mortgage.

“Holy shit,” he whispers to the six envelopes in his hand.  He looks up at the picture hung above the table: Octavia on her middle school graduation day, wearing a towel as a cape over her dress, laughing and bright-eyed.  He feels like he might faint.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drop me a comment here on on [Tumblr](http://andrevvminyard.tumblr.com) if you liked the chapter!


	6. Chapter 6

Clarke can tell immediately that there’s something wrong with Bellamy but he shrugs her off with, “it’s nothing, Clarke, seriously” when she asks.

She wants to push the matter but her parents are in the other room and Bellamy’s got this fake but convincing smile plastered across his face and she settles for hanging his coat up in the coat closet and trailing after him into the living room.

Abby greets him with gusto that might not all be fake and shakes his hand.  And if Clarke hadn’t gotten to know him so well over the last month or so, she wouldn’t have noticed the line of tension in his shoulders, like he was just waiting for the next shoe to drop.

“Jake’s grilling steaks in the backyard.  You eat meat right?” Abby asks quickly.

“Absolutely,” Bellamy replies and Abby smiles.

She leads them outside and Clarke knows he won’t say anything about what’s wrong until he’s ready but she threads her fingers through his and squeezes and she can see the tension release from his shoulders and thinks that might have been the bob of a swallow.  He does squeeze her fingers back, so hard it almost hurts a little, but the pain makes her feel a little bit alive.

And Clarke thinks,  _ oh help me help me help me _ .

Abby had slaved all day over their outside patio furniture, vacuuming the already spotless cushions within an inch of their life and sweeping the wood over and over until she might have been sweeping the varnish right off.  The table is set for four with some of their nicest outdoor-approved plates, contrasting oddly with the sizzle of meat on the barbecue and the smell of roasting corn.

Jake greets Bellamy warmly with a slap on the back with his free hand and a wild grin that Bellamy returns.

“We haven’t seen you much lately, how’ve you been?”

Clarke almost resents her father’s blindness to the situation.  After Abby had stopped kicking him out of their bedroom and throwing vases he’d bought her for their anniversaries at his head, he’d lapsed happily back into married bliss: weeks on Wall Street and weekends wearing his stained “World’s Best Dad” apron, humming on their patio, flipping burgers and smiling at his wife.

He’d been cancer-free for two years and Clarke couldn’t have been happier about it.  But that’d didn’t mean she spend too much of her time waiting for her family’s tenuous peace to break.

“Oh, you know, nothing much.”  Bellamy grins.  “Making the most of my last summer of freedom.”

“My kind of man.  Clarke, honey, would you go grab the serving plate from the table?  These suckers are ready to eat.”

Clarke passes it to him and nods Bellamy over to the table.  He’s awkward now, pulling out her chair for her with stumbling motions and she smiles at him, ghosting her hand across his knuckled on the back of her chair as she sits down.  When she reaches for her water glass to take a quick sip, she notices Abby watching from inside the screen door, eyes narrowed.  A small bloom of pride grows in her chest and she resists the urge to smile.

“What?” Bellamy demands from next to her, clearly catching on anyway.

“Nothing,” she tells him.  “I’m just happy you’re here.”

And the smile that breaks across his face is worth any of the awkwardness that dinner might bring.

And then Jake is sliding in on Bellamy’s other side, slinging a giant steak onto his plate with a flourish and Clarke’s reaching for the salad, and Abby is handing her husband a beer with a real smile and maybe tonight won’t be too bad after all.

“Mashed potatoes, Bellamy?” Abby asks, holding the bowl out and it feels like a peace offering.

“Thank you, Mrs. Griffin,” he says cautiously, reaching across the table to take them from her.

There’s a long beat during which Bellamy spoons potatoes onto his plate and Clarke stares down at the napkin in her lap.  Abby chews her lip.

“Why don’t you call me Abby,” she says finally and Bellamy’s head snaps up so quickly it might well have broken off his neck.

There’s a small smile tugging at the corners of Abby’s lips and Bellamy returns it, his eyes lighting up in that way that makes Clarke feel like she’s going to float away.  He just nods and picks up his knife and fork and the matter is settled.

Clarke can’t help but notice as she looks back at her food that across the table from her, her father is trying to hide a smile.

 

“So maybe she’s not going to murder me in my sleep,” Bellamy tells Clarke after dinner.

They’re leaning against his car, his hand on her waist, her looking up at him from under her lashes, eyes a deep ocean blue against the dark black of her lashes.

“I think she might actually like you,” Clarke huffs out around a laugh and Bellamy shouldn’t feel this relieved.  But he does.

“You want me to be honest?” he asks.

“Always.”

“I don’t care if she likes me or not.”

One of Clarke’s eyebrows go up.

“I only care that I have you.”

Her grin is incredulous.  She’s clearly torn between being touched and wanting to call him sappy and ridiculous.  “You’re absurd,” she settles on.  “But God help me, I love you anyway.”

He leans in closer, hears her breath hitch as her eyes half-close.  “I love you, too,” he whispers against her lips for the first time and then he  kisses her.  She’s smiling under his mouth and her hands come up to wrap around his neck, pulling him down.  Somehow she always tastes like green tic-tacs, even though he’s never seen her with them, and he decided long ago that he loves the taste, loves her, loves everything.

One of his hands tangles in her hair and she sighs against him, going up on her tip toes, one arm cinching farther around his neck as the other trails down over his shoulder, over his chest to his side, where it tightens in his shirt.  Emboldened, one of Bellamy’s hands wanders down her back, slowly, ever so slowly, if only to give her a chance to push him back.  But she doesn’t, just squeezes in farther as her mouth opens under his and Bellamy’s in heaven because he knows that no matter how many times he kisses Clarke, each time will be better than the last.

Her skin is almost too hot to the touch when he ghosts just the edge of one finger under her tank top onto her waist above her shorts and she shivers and Bellamy is lost to the smell of her gardenia shampoo and the taste of tic-tacs and the feeling of Clarke’s tongue against his and her fingers in his hand and pressing hard against his side through his shirt and the smooth skin of her back.

_ I love you _ he whispers again and again and she swallows them down, fingers twisting even deeper into his hair and it hurts a little but he loves it because it’s real and it’s Clarke and her parents could be watching them out the window and he wouldn’t be able to rip himself away.

When they do break apart they’re both gasping.  There’s a flush high in her cheeks and her eyes are sparkling with a bright light and Bellamy feels a rush of pride because  _ he _ put that there.

“I should go home,” he manages and she nods, still a little breathless.

“Yeah, okay.  But I’ll see you tomorrow?”

He nods and she smiles, her hands dropping away from him.  He slips his keys out of his pocket and swings into the driver’s seat as Clarke backs up the driveway.  n his rearview mirror, he watches as she stands on the porch, arms crossed, leaning against a column, until he turns a corner and she’s lost from view.

 

The house is silent when Clarke steps back in the front door.  Silent except for the calming ticking of the grandfather clock tucked in behind the door and Clarke leans back against the door, closing her eyes, savoring the feeling of Bellamy’s lips on hers.

“Clarke?” Abby calls too soon from the living room and she shakes herself out of her reverie.

“Yeah, I’m coming.”

She strolls into the living room trying to look nonchalant and like she’s not waiting on a thread.  Abby’s curled up on the couch flipping through a fancy Home & Garden magazine and Jake’s flipping channels.  He pauses on a baseball game before flicking back to  _ Law & Order  _  reruns.  He smiles at Clarke and she folds herself onto the loveseat next to him.

“Dinner was nice,” he tells her, handing over the remote.  She accepts it without looking away from Abby, whose finger is stuck on a page, halfway through turning it.

“Bellamy’s a nice young man,” she says finally before flipping the page with a loud  _ schick _ and Clarke feels like she can breathe again.

She sees her father’s lips quirk into the smallest of smiles as she relaxes back onto the couch and his hand is on her shoulder, squeezing slightly.

“Why don’t you invite him over next weekend?  For the garden party?”

“I’ll ask if he’s available.”

“You know the Jahas are coming.”

Clarke did.  She’d been exchanging texts with Wells about it for weeks and she was excited to see him.  It’d been too long.

“Yes.”

Abby nods and turns another page and just like that Clarke’s run the gauntlet, it’s over, and she resists taking her phone out of her pocket to text Bellamy.

She does later though, when her parents have both filed off to bed and she’s sitting out on the porch alone, listening to the gulls shriek to each other in the trees and the water crash on their private beach.

This was where it had all really started, she thinks, not that day in the country club where he’d been more of a life raft than anything else.  It was here that she’d invited him into his life and he’d accepted.

She kicked her shoes off and walked down to the shore, digging her feet into the sand and letting the surf rush over her toes.  It was grounding and she tipped her head back, feeling the cool ocean breeze against her cheeks.

Her phone chimed in her pocket and she groped for it blindly.

_ Bell: Glad to hear it.  And yes, I’m around on Sunday for your howdy do. _

She chuckled and types back:  _ Good. It’d be deathly boring without you. _

_ Bell: Glad to help, princess. _

_ Bell: Good night, Clarke. _

She snapped her phone shut and smiled out at the ocean.  One of her best friends was coming into town and her mother actually approved of a boy she’d chosen herself.  Brown and the rest of her life had never felt so far away.

 

Bellamy argues with himself over confronting Aurora about the stack of unpaid bills but ultimately it’s Octavia who deters him.  They’re out on the roof one night after Bellamy’s come home from a day out on the beach with Clarke and O’s poking at his shirt collar, trying to get a better look at the hickeys underneath it.  He’s feeling a bit cross and tired and he bats her hand away until she shifts back, frowning.

“Have you noticed that Mom’s been acting weird lately?” she asks finally, quietly.

Bellamy swallows and loops his arms around his knees.  “It’s that time of year again,” he replies simply, referring to the month of July when, three years ago, their father had left their lives forever.

“It seems worse than usual.”

Bellamy opens his mouth to tell her about the overdue notices but there’s something in the meekness of his sister’s voice that reminds him how young she is.   _ She doesn’t deserve this _ , he tells himself and his jaw snaps shut.

“I don’t know, O,” he says and the lie tastes bitter on his tongue.  “I’m sure everything’s fine.”

She looks over at him with those big eyes, shining bright and trustful and Bellamy has never hated himself more than he does in this moment.  “Are you sure?”

He swallows again.  “Totally.”

He’s not sure why he doesn’t tell Clarke.  He doesn’t think it’s the money because Clarke doesn’t act like a rich person and sometimes he manages to forget it, when they’re driving somewhere in her kind of shitty car and stopping at gas stations in the middle of New Hampshire so Clarke can buy terrible convenience store pizza and a Slurpee.

He only remembers when he walks through the front door of her house and he’s confronted with the money, hanging on the wall in the form of gold-plated picture frames and in the closet in the form of the Griffins’ Sunday finery.  But Clarke spends so little time in her own house he’d think she was allergic to it and maybe she is.

One thing he knows for sure is that he’s never felt so free as when he’s with her, like they could just keep driving, wind their way down through Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and onwards.  Maybe they’d make it to Canada.  Sometimes at night when he’s lying in his bed he fantasizes about him and Clarke walking the old streets of Quebec City, stumbling over their barely there French.  Or maybe driving across the plains of Manitoba and Saskatchewan and over the Rockies into the towering forests of British Columbia until finally they hit the Pacific.  He imagines a Clarke free of Abby’s influence, laughing for the hell of it and throwing caution to the wind.  And then he kicks himself because no matter how much he wants it, and no matter how much she talks about wanting it, Clarke will never be able to rip herself away from this world.  Not really.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t tell her about the bills.  Because he knows that no matter how hard she tries, she’ll never really understand.

When he and Octavia file back in the window, the house is quiet, barely even creaking in the wind.  Octavia slips out the door and down the hall and he hears her footsteps carry her down the hallway until her door opens and closes.  Bellamy flops back on his bed and stares up at the ceiling and wishes that the summer would never end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come hang out with me on [Tumblr!](http://andrevvminyard.tumblr.com)


	7. Chapter 7

Three days after Bellamy comes over for dinner, Clarke’s woken in the middle of the night by an incessant vibration under her cheek.  She startles up, still half asleep to realize that she had somehow rolled over onto her phone and it was ringing.  Sleepily she reaches out and picks it up and, without checking the caller id, answers.

“Hello?” she mutters into the receiver, voice still a little raspy from sleep.

“Clarke?”

She straightens.  “Bellamy?  Bellamy, what’s wrong?”

His voice is frantic and too much for two in the morning.  And it is two in the morning, Clarke can see now.  The red digits on her bedside clock are blinking at her angrily, as if to reprimand her for being awake at all.

“I know this is a lot and it’s two am but Clarke I need your help.”

She’s half out of bed before she even registers deciding to get up.  She’s hunting for a pair of pants when she says, “Yes, Bell, anything what is it?”

“Can you get Octavia and bring her to the hospital?”

Clarke stops dead, one leg jammed into a pair of jeans she should not be wearing without washing, cold panic washing over her.

“The hospital?” she manages, panic leaking into her voice.

“It’s not me, I’m fine,” and she can hear the sound of an intercom over the speaker now.  “And so’s O. It’s…it’s our mom, Clarke.  Something’s wrong and I don’t know what it is.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she assures him and hangs up, grabbing the first shirt and sees and dragging it over her head.

In the kitchen she scribbles her parents a note and leaves it where they’re sure to see it in the morning and dashes out the door.  The brisk summer evening catches her a bit off guard and she realizes she forgot a jacket but she pushes on, unlocking her car and shoving herself inside, speeding too fast out of the driveway and skidding a bit around the corner.

All she can think as she switches on her high beams and beats out the familiar path to the Blakes’ is  _ the hospital, the hospital.  I have to get Octavia and get to the hospital. _

Octavia sits in her passenger seat, white-faced and silent, and it’s the stupidest thing but Clarke realizes that this is the first time Octavia has been in her car.  She doesn’t know why this niggles at her the entirety of the silent drive to the closest hospital a couple of towns over.  Maybe it’s because Clarke had been hoping that the younger girl would one day come with her and Bellamy on their spontaneous driving afternoons and now, every time she steps into the car, she’ll be reminded of this, arguably one of the worst nights in her life.

She’s never seen Octavia look so her age, withdrawn and silent, and  _ young _ , missing the fire and the spunk that Clarke had always admired about her.  How, no matter how much Bellamy liked to act otherwise, she was the one protecting her big brother not the other way around.

Clarke wants to tell her that it’s going to be okay but she can’t know that.  She remembers the endless stream of nurses and doctors and cafeteria ladies who kindly told her that her father would be fine, that it always looked worse than it was, the and roiling ball of anger in her stomach.  She wouldn’t do that for Octavia.  So instead she stayed silent, knuckles white around her steering wheel, taking the curves a bit too fast and the straightaways like they were a racetrack and she was losing.

The parking lot is nearly empty except for the small fleet of ambulances parked behind a chain link fence and Bellamy’s familiar car, flung across two parking spots in front of the entrance like it had been abandoned in a hurry.  Clarke puts her hand across Octavia’s back as they walk inside and the fluorescent ceiling lights are glaringly bright against Clarke’s eyes.  The smell of antiseptic and wall-to-wall white has bile rising in the back of her throat but she shoves it down.  Now is not a time for her to be slipping back into old memories.  She’s here for Octavia and Bellamy, who’s folded into a chair next to the nurses’ station, white as a sheet under his olive complexion and freckles.

The relief that breaks across his face when he sees them almost breaks her heart.  She can feel the tears in the corners of her eyes, prickling and demanding to be let out, and only her years of tamping down her feelings and smiling through the pain allows her to keep them at bay.

“Bell,” Octavia breathes and she runs into her brother’s arms.

They wrap around each other like magnets, like two people whose only shelter in each other and Clarke stands there in the waiting room alone, with her heart breaking, because she’ll never know what that feels like.

Bellamy’s whispering something into Octavia’s ear and she nods and steps back and he smiles at Clarke.  It’s a broken smile that she tries to return but she knows it’s only a shadow of what he deserves.  She crosses the room towards him and holds her arms out and he falls into them gratefully.  She leans her head onto his shoulder and squeezes her arms around his middle, probably too tight but he’s breathing out what might be hitching sobs against her neck and his hands are scrabbling in the fabric of her t-shirt.

“Is she okay?” Clarke whispers into his hair and he shrugs.

“They haven’t told me yet.”

“Okay,” she whispers, smoothing a hand down his back. “Okay.”

She pulls back slowly and runs her fingers lightly under his eyes, where his skin is red. She takes his arm in one hand and Octavia’s in the other and guides them to the bank of chairs Bellamy had been sitting in earlier.

“You two stay here I’m going to be right back.”  She pats her pocket.  “I have my phone if you need anything, okay?”

They both nod and she turns on her heel, sucking in a deep breath to keep her composure.  She follows the signs to the cafeteria and gets two hot chocolates and a coffee for herself as well as a selection of chips and candy bars.  It’s not the best of options but it’s all she’d be able to dig up at this hour of the morning anywhere else anyway.

When she returns to the waiting room, Bellamy and Octavia haven’t moved.  They’re still as statues in their seats but Bellamy tries to smile when she passes him a cup of hot chocolate.

“Thank you,” he says and she nods, passing the second to Octavia and dumping the candy into the girl’s lap.

“Anything?” Clarke asks and Bellamy shrugs.

“They said there’s a doctor in with her and he’d be out as soon as he has news.”

Clarke chews her lip and sits down, taking another long drag on her coffee.  “What happened?” she demands and Bellamy sighs.

“I was in the kitchen getting some water and I heard Mom moving around upstairs, doing I don’t know what.”  He pauses.  “Then there was this horrible thud.  I…I ran upstairs and found O in the doorway to her room, staring.  Mom was on the ground, all splayed out.  I tried to help her stand and she just couldn’t.  Somehow I managed to get her into the car and then I was just driving.  I called you once I got here.”  He takes a shaky breath.  “Thank you, by the way, for bringing O.”

“It was nothing,” Clarke reassures him, taking his hand into both of hers and squeezing.  “I’ll be here as long as you need me to be.”

“Your parents?”

“I wrote them a note and I’ll call them in a couple hours.”

He nods, gratitude written across his face.  “Thank you.”

She leans forward and kisses his forehead, leaving her lips pressed there.  “Of course.”  She pulls back to look him in the eye and squeezes his hand.  “I’m here for you.  For both of you.”

He nods.  “I know.”

 

A man in a white coat appears probably twenty minutes later and crosses the room right to Bellamy.  Clarke’s still got his hand in hers but she’s leaning over, whispering something to Octavia and he’s thankful.  He doesn’t know what he’d say to his sister, not when his head is buzzing with worry over his mother and her condition and the unpaid bills stuffed into his sock drawer and the secrets in their family that he never knew they had.

“Bellamy Blake?” the man asks, and his voice is soft and warm.

Bellamy stands abruptly, his hand falling out of Clarke.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m Dr. Mahoney, would you come with me?”

He spares the quickest glance over his shoulder at Clarke who nods and smiles tightly.  She wraps her arm around Octavia and mouths, “we’ll be right here.”

He nods, and follows after Mahoney, thankful that at least Clarke is there, empty cup of coffee by her feet, chocolate bar wrapper shoved into her jeans pocket.  That at least if something like this had to happen, he had Clarke to take care of O.

Mahoney leads him down a hallway away from the semi-crowd of the waiting room.  “Does your mother have any other close living relatives?”

Bellamy bristles.  “I’m over eighteen, I can—“

Mahoney shakes his head.  “No, no, son, I understand, that’s not an issue.  I just wanted to know if there was anyone else you’d like to try to contact.  Sometimes in situations like this you’re not quite thinking clearly…” He trails off.

Bellamy shakes his head.  “No.  It’s just me and my sister.”

Mahoney sighs.  “Okay.  Well, then, your mother—“

“Is she going to be okay?”

Mahoney edges around the question with an “she’s all right now.  Resting.  I think you and your sister will be able to get in shortly to see her.”  There’s something in his voice that has Bellamy’s hackles raising.

“Doctor?”

Mahoney sighs.  “I always hate having to say this to people.  Bellamy…your mother has late stage cancer.”

 

Clarke’s phone rang at eight-thirty she knew even before she looked at the caller ID that it would be her mother on the other end.

“Mom, hi.”  She stands and wanders away from Bellamy and Octavia, aware that she sounds as tired as she feels.

“Clarke, honey, where are you?”

“You got my note?”

“Of course but—“

“I’m still at the hospital with Bellamy and Octavia.  I, uh, I think it’s going to be a little while.”

“Is their mother okay?”

Clarke heaves a heavy sigh and looks over at Bell and O, her curled into his lap, his hand twirling a piece of her hair aimlessly.  Octavia’s eyes were red but she wasn’t crying anymore.  Something told Clarke that she’d run out of tears hours ago.  Clarke knows that by now her eyes are dry, just like her throat, that it feels like sandpaper rubbed raw.

“No,” Clarke sighs into the phone.  “No, she’s not.”

 

They drop Octavia off at a friend’s house.  They leave Bellamy’s car in Clarke’s driveway and Clarke drives.  And drives.  She has no destination in mind, just knows that she needs to get Bellamy away from Kennebunkport, away from anything that will remind him of the hospital bed his mother is still lying in, hooked up to IVs and a heart monitor.

He stares out the window with a blankness that makes Clarke’s heart ache and she resists the urge to reach out for his hand.  He knows that she’s there.  She just needs to let him come to her.

And he does, when she pulls into the parking lot of a regional park in a town she’s never been to.  The parking lot is empty except for them and he walks closer to her than he needs to, the backs of their hands brushing until he finally weaves their fingers together, so tightly she’d think that he was trying to crush the bones in her knuckles.  She just squeezes back just as hard and she finally sees some of the tension in his shoulders drain away.

“I don’t know how we’re supposed to do this,” he confides in her later.

They’re on a grassy knoll that looks out over a meadow, wildflowers waving in the slight breeze.  It feels wrong, Clarke thinks, that something so beautiful as this could exist in a world where people are dying.

Clarke doesn’t bother with the usual sentiments.  Bellamy doesn’t want to hear that everything’s going to be okay and she has no interest in lying to him.  “Did the doctor say if it was serious?”

Bellamy breathes out a heavy sigh.  “They’re still running tests,” he parrots.  “Which means they probably know something and don’t want to tell me.”

Clarke bites her lip and reaches out to put her hand on top of his.

“No matter what,” she tells her fiercely.  “I’m here.”

He flips his hand over and weaves their fingers together.  She squeezes.

“I know,” he says and his voice sounds broken.

Clarke leans her head over onto his shoulder and he puts his on top of hers and they stay here, hands intertwined in the dirt between them, watching as the sun lowers in the sky and the wildflowers keep on waving, oblivious to the fact that somewhere in the world, there is death and sadness.

 

Clarke offers to stay over with him and Octavia that night but Bellamy tells her to go home, that he and O can handle themselves.  She doesn’t necessarily look happy about it but she nods, hugs him tightly in her driveway, and watches as he backs his car out of her driveway and turns the corner away.

It’s not until he’s turned off the Griffins’ street that he allows himself to regret not taking Clarke up on her offer.  The selfish part of him wants nothing more than to have her come home with him, to curl up on the couch with her and watch mindless game shows, to let her pet Octavia’s hair and whisper half-truths and lies into his sister’s hair.  But that’s not Clarke’s job.  It’s his.

_ Your sister, your responsibility _ , Aurora had said to him once and now more than ever, Bellamy needs to prove to himself that his mother’s trust in him was not misplaced.

Octavia’s waiting for him on the front porch when he pulls into her friend’s driveway, the other girl’s mom behind her, lip pulled taut between her teeth, a worried look in her eye.

Bellamy turns the car off and steps out, forcing himself to be strong, if only for Octavia.

“Thank you for watching her, ma’am,” he calls up the driveway as she comes closer and she tries to smile.

“Of course, Bellamy, it was my pleasure.  This is hard enough on you as it is.”

He nods, not trusting himself to speak and holds his hand out to Octavia.  “You ready to go home, O?”

She nods and stands.  “Where’s Clarke?”

“At home.”

She nods again and, in a small little broken voice says, “thank you,” to her friend’s mom.

“Of course, sweetheart,” the woman says, reaching out to ruffle her hair.  “Anytime you need to get out of that house, either of you, you’re welcome over here, all right?”

Bellamy nods.  “Thank you.”

“Be safe, both of you.”

“We will,” Octavia replies and Bellamy feels a rush of pride in his chest.

Octavia doesn’t once ask if Aurora is going to be okay and Bellamy doesn’t bother with answering questions she’s not going to ask.  The house feels too still when they pull into the driveway and Bellamy swallows.

“You going to be okay here, O?” he asks after a long moment.

She nods.  “Yeah, Bell,” she replies.  “Are you?”

He looks over at her to meet her shining eyes, and sees worry there.  Real worry, for him.  His heart breaks.

“Yeah,” he says softly, looking at the house.  “Yeah, I think so.”

 

Clarke doesn’t hear from Bellamy aside from the casual text that he and O are both doing all right for the next few days.  Out of respect, Abby cancels the garden party they were supposed to be throwing on the weekend and makes it clear to Clarke that both Bellamy and Octavia are welcome to one of their spare rooms if they needed the company.  Clarke passes on the offer but isn’t surprised when Bellamy immediately turns it down.  The Blake siblings were an autonomous force and in their time of need, all they really needed was each other.  They didn’t need to be waited on, or have almost strangers buzzing around them whispering about their business.  They just needed to be left alone.

So when Bellamy texts her two days after Aurora was checked into the hospital asking if she would come over, she’s thrown on her jacket and has one foot jammed into a shoe before she even finishes texting back an affirmative.  Neither of her parents are home so she just runs out the door, texting her dad as she goes, and she’s in the Blakes’ driveway within the half hour.

Bellamy has clearly been waiting by the door because he swings it open as soon as she turns of her car and she just manages to stop herself from running to him and enveloping him in her arms.

He looks wrecked, in that way that only nights upon nights of no sleep and stress can make you look and Clarke is swallowing back tears.

“Thanks for coming,” he says when she’s within hearing distance and she doesn’t bother responding, just pulls him into a tight hug.

His arms come up around her back slowly but his grip is like iron around her middle.  He buries his head in her hair and she presses her lips to his neck, just over his pulse point where she can feel his heartbeat, slow and steady.

“What do you need?” she whispers into his ear and he shakes his head.

“Just you.”

“Okay,” she says, reaching up to stroke a hand through his hair.  “Okay.”

She doesn’t know how long they stand in the entryway before he pulls away.  “We’ve just been holed up in the living room mostly,” he admits, looking a bit sheepish.  “The house is a mess.”

She smiles and traces a hand down his cheek.  “Don’t worry about it.”

His eyes are thankful as she brushes past him into the entryway.  She leaves her shoes by the door and her coat hanging over the banister and heads into the living room.  Octavia is curled up on the couch, knees hugged to her chest, eyes on the soap opera playing out on the TV.  But Clarke knows that look, recognizes it from the months after her own father’s diagnosis.  It’s the one that says, “I’m coping” when it’s so obvious that you’re not.

She sinks down onto the couch and puts a hand on Octavia’s shoulder.  Octavia tries for a smile but comes up short and Clarke’s hand tightens as Octavia’s head comes down on her shoulder.  Bellamy folds himself into the remaining space on the couch on Clarke’s other side and his hand finds its way into hers and the three of them shift their silent attention to the TV, Clarke the grounding presence in their sea of sorrow.

Eventually Octavia says something about wanting to turn in early and shambles off upstairs.  Clarke shifts over slightly allowing Bellamy more room but he follows her, keeping himself sandwiched to her side.  She kisses his hair and his face drops onto her shoulder, exhaling deeply.

“How’s your mom?” Clarke asks softly.

Bellamy lets out a long sigh.  They’d managed to avoid talking about Aurora and Clarke hated to bring her up but the unanswered questions were hovering between them.

“She’s all right.”  He pauses.  “We haven’t been in to see her.”

“Bell…”

“I can’t, Clarke.” His voice is suddenly sharp.  She flinches.

He moves his head from her shoulder and hunches over, elbows on his knees, face in his hands.  “She lied to me,” he says finally.

Clarke shifts. She considers putting her hand on his shoulder where the muscles are tight and angry under the soft fabric of his t-shirt before she does.  He relaxes under her fingers, turning his head to look at her.  He must find something he was looking for in her face because he sighs again and rubs the heel of his hand over his face.  It’s a gesture that’s too old for him and Clarke’s heart cracks open.

“She knew.  She knew she was sick and she didn’t tell us.  She didn’t tell  _ me. _ ”

 

There’s naked shock on Clarke’s face as his words sink in.  He feels almost lighter already, as if those words had been weighing him down.

“What?” she demands.

“I talked to another doctor at the hospital yesterday,” he tells her.  “He said she was doing all right but she was declining.  That the disease is taking its normal course for how advanced it is but of course, I already knew that.”

“ _ Jesus Christ _ ,” Clarke mutters.  “How could she-?”

He shrugs.  “Beats me.  But it’s not the first time.  She’s been lying since we got here.”

Some part of him must have been itching to tell Clarke about the unpaid bills despite his reservations because he’d slipped the envelopes into a drawer in the coffee table before their impromptu trip to the hospital.  Or maybe he’d been hoping his mom would find them and she’d finally have to explain herself.  Now he dumps them into his girlfriend’s lap almost brusquely and it’s with shaking fingers that Clarke picks them up.

“I thought you said your mom got a lot of money from the divorce,” she says slowly.

“So did I,” he replies.

She looks up at him.  “What are you going to do?”

He scrubs his hands through his hair.  “I can’t tell her,” he insists.  “I can’t tell Octavia.”

Clarke just stares at him, pain in her eyes.

“Can I?”

She grimaces. “Would you rather lie to her about it?”

“She’s fifteen, Clarke!”

“And she’s strong.  she can handle it.  And I think she deserves the truth.”

Bellamy groans.

“It’s your decision, Bell, it’s your family.  But you can’t protect her from everything.  And you shouldn’t try.”

“She’s so young,” he whispers brokenly.’

Clarke takes his hand and squeezes, running her thumb across the ridges of his knuckles.  He looks up and she leans forward to press her lips to his forehead.

“So are you, Bellamy,” she whispers against his skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come find me on [Tumblr!](http://andrevvminyard.tumblr.com)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve been terribly behind on my schedule for this fic and I’m terribly sorry for that. I was convinced today was Wednesday for 3/4 of the day and that’s basically been my entire week. But here we go, a little bit of a break from the depressing stuff. (and did someone say Wells?)

Clarke drives Bellamy and Octavia back to the hospital the next day.  Bellamy fidgets into the passenger seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs, tapping his fingers on the door.

Clarke catches Octavia eyeing her brother angrily more than once but the younger girl stays quiet.  Bellamy had still refused to talk to her about how their mother had known about her illness long before her collapse in their upstairs hallway or the bills tucked away in Bellamy’s bag, but Octavia was smart enough to sense there were bigger pieces in motion than had been revealed to her.

There’s something less ominous about the hospital in the bright light of the day, Clarke thinks as they pull into the parking lot.  It feels almost harmless now without the cover of darkness and the impending worry for the loss of a loved one.

There are two beds in Aurora’s room but she’s the only occupant, sitting up in bed wearing a printed hospital gown, eyes fixed on a TV set playing a  _ Grey’s Anatomy _ rerun.  Clarke thinks it’s an ironic choice for a hospital.

Octavia goes in first, falling right into their mother’s arms, burying her face in her shoulder.  Clarke and Bellamy pause at the door and Clarke scans Bellamy’s face, taking in the tightness around his eyes, the hard set of his mouth.  There’s pain in his eyes but it’s disappearing as she watches, melding away into an intense nothingness.

“I’ll stay out here,” Clarke tells him.  “Take your time.”

He nods, brushes a hand across her back in thanks and steps into the room, closing the door firmly behind him.  Clarke slides down the wall and pulls out her phone.  She has a text from Wells, saying he’s sorry they hadn’t made it up the last weekend but they were working on changing their plans.  He’s asking after Bellamy’s mom and Clarke tilts her head back against the wall, eyes closing.

It all feels like too much for someone so young.  The lies and the lies that Aurora had crafted into a shaking tower that had finally fallen down around her.  Now she’s trapped in that room, strapped to beeping machines with nurses and doctors buzzing around her like bees.  She’d probably been looking forward to seeing her children.  Clarke wonders how she’d react to that hard look in her son’s eyes.  If she’d realize immediately that she's the one who put it there.

She can’t hear anything for a long time, just gentle murmuring that might be the TV and might be the Blakes.

Then there’s shouting.

It’s so sudden that she almost jumps out of her skin and she does bang her head hard against the wall.  It sends angry tremors of pain down the back of her skull and into her neck and she rubs at it distractedly, ears peeled.

“Bellamy,” she can hear Aurora begging.  “Bellamy, please, try to understand.”

“Understand?” he retorts. “Understand what?  All I know is that you have been  _ lying _ to me since we got here.  You’ve dug us into this  _ hole  _ and now you’re  _ stuck here  _ and what am I supposed to do, huh?  What am I supposed to do with a mother who lied about her cancer diagnosis and a stack of unpaid bills you’re telling me we don’t have the money to pay?”

There’s a note of panic in his voice now, and something that almost sounds like the beginning of tears.  Clarke clenches her fists, forces herself to stay on the floor.  This isn’t her fight and she knows that it’s something Bellamy has to handle on his own.  But it still hurts to hear the boy she loves screaming at the woman who’s supposed to be able to protect him, who’s supposed to care for him and love him.  But the more Clarke learned, the more it seemed like Aurora Blake hadn’t been doing that for a long time before the bills started piling up.

“Oh, I’m scaring her, am I?  Well, maybe  _ you should have thought of that! _ ”

His voice dies down and there’s almost silence.  The hallway is deserted still which doesn’t seem right.  Surely someone had heard that.  Surely someone cared.

The door opens quietly and Octavia’s small form slips out.  She sits next to Clarke and smiles a tight smile.

“You okay?” Clarke asks softly, nudging her shoulder.

Octavia shrugs.  “As okay as I can be.  My brother’s screaming at my mom.  She’s crying.  He’s going to.”  She swallows.  “How could she?”

“I don’t know, O.”

“Bellamy tries so hard.  He tries so hard to be a good role model and to help her out when she needs it and…and then this is what she repays him with.” Octavia’s voice is bitter and Clarke recoils from it.

Octavia’s eyes are hard when they flash up to meet Clarke’s.

“After he walks out of that room he’ll be done,” she tells Clarke and there’s something hidden deep in her voice that makes Clarke believe it.

This was Bellamy’s last straw.  He’d been holding it together remarkably well in the days since he found out about Aurora’s diagnosis, pushing it down and pushing it down until this moment when he finally could let it all out.  Until all of his anger and repressed emotions could pour out, until his mother finally understood.

She’d seen pieces of this Blake sibling loyalty over the few months that she’d known them.  Octavia sticking up for Bellamy here, a protective glare there.  But this is something new entirely.  Octavia is almost daring Clarke to say that Bellamy’s wrong for turning his back on their mother while she lies prone and helpless in a hospital bed.  But Clarke had seen that haunted look in Bellamy’s eyes and heard the anger and sadness and desperation in his voice.  And she knew that she had no right to be judging any of his choices.  Not when her biggest fantasy was packing a bag and getting as far away from her own mother as was physically possible.

Bellamy leaves the room with his head held high but his shoulders slumped in defeat.  He’s chewing on his bottom lip in a way that Clarke knows means he’s trying not to fall apart and Octavia scrambles to his side immediately, arms going around his middle in a tight hug, her face pressed to his chest.

He pats her back absently but his eyes move immediately to Clarke and there’s raw pain there that makes her heart squeeze and tears prick behind her eyes.

“That sounds like it went well,” she comments, trying for light, and she’s rewarded by the smallest of smiles from him.

“I just couldn’t stop,” he confesses.  “Once I started it just all came out.”

Clarke stands, feeling her joints pop, angry at being forced to sit on the floor for so long and wraps an arm around his shoulders.  “Let’s go home, yeah?”

She gets a real smile that time, honest and warm under the still-there tinge of sadness and his eyes scream  _ thank you _ in every language that Clarke understands.

 

It’s two weeks after Aurora Blake’s hospitalization, Clarke is in the passenger seat of his car, they’re winding their way down the I-95 under signs for Boston, and Bellamy’s amazed by how great he feels.

He knows he should be upset, that he should be thinking about his mother, hooked up to all those machines in that hospital bed.  But instead, he just feels free.  Octavia had handled the news that their mother had been lying to them better than he’d been expecting and Clarke had been nothing but exceptionally supportive.  But Bellamy didn’t want to think about it anymore.  The doctors said that Aurora’s cancer was responding well to treatment, he’d managed to persuade the bill collectors to give them a bit more time, the sun was high in the sky, and even the rich high-society types of Kennebunkport hadn’t been grating on his nerves as much lately.

“Wells is really excited to meet you,” Clarke told him, running a hand through her hair, turned even more golden by the sun she’d been spending so much time in.  “I’ve been talking about you basically nonstop since we met.”

Bellamy grins and tightens his grip on the steering wheel.  “I can’t wait to meet this illusive best friend.”

“Technically his girlfriend is my best friend but that’s just semantics.”

Bellamy rolls his eyes and reaches for her hand across the console.  Her fingers are warm from where they’ve been resting on her lap in full view of the sun and she turns to look out the window, hair blowing a bit in the wind rushing in through the open sun roof and her lips are quirked up in the smallest of half-smiles and Bellamy’s never felt so light.

Bellamy’s heard plenty about Wells Jaha, too, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a bit nervous about meeting someone who’s such an integral part of Clarke’s life.

And he knows exactly what she’d say if he confessed his feelings.   _ You’re important, too, Bellamy,  _ she’d tell him with that small knowing smile that makes him feel like his insides are melting.

He doesn’t say it though.  He doesn’t need to.

The Griffins had met the Jahas when the second family was living on Cape Cod years before but they had since moved back into the city to accommodate Wells’ father’s professorship at Harvard.  His mother was a neurosurgeon at Mass General and according to Clarke, Wells was on a fast track to early graduation from MIT and grad school somewhere equally impressive.

Clarke had been talking about taking to Bellamy to Boston for weeks now and picking up Wells for his planned weekend in Maine turned out to be the perfect opportunity.  Wells was tied up with something until the early afternoon but Clarke and Bellamy had left early enough to arrive in the city in the middle of the morning so they had time to explore the city by themselves.

Clarke, it becomes immediately clear, has spent a great deal of time in Boston.  Bellamy realizes he should have been expecting that but still it comes as a surprise that she can so easily direct him off the highway and to a tucked-away parking garage whose rates aren’t outrageously expensive.

It’s a typical summer day in New England, warm and kind of stuffy, but Bellamy was born and raised in Virginia and this is nothing.  They spill out onto the street and into a clump of tourists with British accents and Clarke’s grinning as she takes his hand and pulls him down the sidewalk.

“Where first?” she asks as they round a corner and he shrugs.

“You’re the one who knows the city.  Anyway, I’m sure you have a list.”

She laughs.  “Well, you would be right.  Ice cream?”

It’s barely lunch time but Bellamy can’t find any reason to complain as she tugs him into a J.P. Lick’s.

Two hours later Bellamy has decided that he likes the city of Boston a lot.  It’s a seamless mix of the modern and the old, the stately brick building of the Old State House standing resolute next to a towering glass skyscraper.  The uneven cobblestones around Quincy Market a trip back in time with the horns of traffic still clear as day behind him.  They follow the red brick line of the Freedom Trail from the Common deeper into the city into the North End and Clarke tugs him away from Mike’s Pastry no matter how hard he protests, insisting that she knows somewhere better.

“Wells would never forgive me if I let you go there,” she tells him as they turn onto Prince Street.  “Now stop frowning, you’re going to give yourself wrinkles.”

Wandering through the graveyards is one of his favorite parts of the afternoon.  He knows that most people would find it morbid but there’s something deep and magical about walking the heavily-tread paths among the tombstones of the men and women who shaped the United States.  Clarke regales him with tales about her and Wells’ youth when her family spent more time in the city and the two of them would sneak out at night, settling down in the center of Copp’s Hill Burying Ground to study the stars.

“You were a rule breaker, weren’t you, Clarke Griffin?” he asks nudging her shoulder and she grins.

“Always.”

He looks over and she’s studying his face in a way that makes his breath stop in his throat.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says slowly.  “It’s just that…” She reaches out and brushes some of his hair away from his eyes.

“If you tell me I look radiant with the sun behind me I’m going to break up with you,” he tells her seriously, “and leave you here.”

Her peals of laughter break the moment but not in a bad way.  She slaps his arm as he moves to slide it around her shoulder and they strike off down the street, Bellamy leaning down swiftly to kiss the crown of her head.

“Just for the record, I think you always look radiant,” she tells him and he snorts.

“Careful, you don’t want to inflate my ego.”

“It’s already outrageously large, Blake, and we both know it.”

“Whoa there, Griffin, be careful how you talk to your ride.”

She grins and loops her arm though his, tugging him closer until they’re sandwiched so closely they can barely walk and just for a moment, Bellamy forgets about August, forgets that this isn’t forever, that there will be a day when Clarke Griffin’s hand isn’t in his.

“We should be getting over to Cambridge, we’re supposed to meet Wells in forty-five minutes.”

Bellamy nods and starts walking.  Clarke’s arm slips out of his and he stops.  She’s standing a handful of steps behind him, arms crossed, grinning.  She jerks a thumb over her shoulder.

“You’re going the wrong way.  T station’s that way.”

His cheeks flood with heat.  Her grin widens.

“I knew that.”

“Sure you did, Bell.” There’s a laugh hiding in her voice that he chooses to ignore.

They’re standing in the hot sun outside the Harvard t-stop, Clarke sipping on an iced coffee, when a man’s voice calls out, “There you are!”

Clarke’s eyes brighten immediately.  She practically throws her coffee at Bellamy and only years and years of practiced reflexes from following Octavia around allow him to stop it from splattering all over his shirt.

“Wells!” Clarke calls back and they collide in a hug, him squeezing her so hard that her feet almost lift off the ground.

“It’s so good to see you, you look great,” he tells her, grinning, one finger flicking a strand of her hair.

Her eyes are sparkling when she smiles and gestures to Bellamy.  “Wells, this is Bellamy Blake.  Bellamy, Wells Jaha.”

Wells, Bellamy thinks as he reaches out to shake his hand, is literally the last thing Bellamy was expecting from the brainiac child of a Harvard professor and award-winning, world-famous neurosurgeon.

He’s full of some kind of bright energy that’s a bit off-putting at first but seeps into you slowly until, before you’re even aware of it, you’re smiling more and there’s a new spring in your step.  He laughs a lot, too, a sudden deep sound that comes from deep in him that catches you by surprise.

His handshake is firm and his teeth are bright white and flashing against his dark skin.  And there’s something in Clarke’s eyes when she’s around him that Bellamy likes.  A softness, maybe, that he’s never seen before and decides he likes immensely.  If Wells Jaha can make Clarke Griffin look at the world like that, Bellamy Blake knows he’s going to like him.

 

Clarke will never admit it but a small part of her had been worrying about how Bellamy and Wells would get along since the Wells had finalized his plans to come visit.  But they’re barely out of the state of Massachusetts, headed back up north, before she realizes that her fears were unnecessary.

Wells takes to Bellamy immediately, delighting in his sense of humor and how easy he is to talk to.  And Bellamy’s the same way, laughing with him over some show that the two of them watch that Clarke’s never heard of and breaking into embarrassing Clarke stories much earlier than she would have liked.

By the time they cross the state border into New Hampshire she can tell that the two have become fast friends.

Bellamy drives them straight to her house and they’re pulling into the driveway a few minutes before six.  They made good time on the way back though of course Bellamy’s lead foot helped a bit with navigating their way through the craziest parts of rush hour.  The house smells like steak and potatoes and the candles burning in the foyer and Abby rushes out of the kitchen immediately when she hears the front door open to envelope Wells in a hug.

At some point both Clarke’s and Wells’ parents had definitely been hoping the two of them would fall madly in love and get married and sometimes Clarke thinks that deep down Abby still harbors those hopes.  But there’s no chance and both Clarke and Wells know it.  He’s attractive, sure, and she loves him but he’ll never be more than anything but a close friend.  And as for Wells, he’s so head over heels for his girlfriend that Clarke doubts he even recognizes she’s a girl anymore.

“Bellamy,” Abby says politely as they shuffle into the kitchen.  “How are you and Octavia doing?”

He shrugs.  “We’re doing all right.  Mom’s supposed to be discharged in the next week so we’ll see how that goes.”

Bellamy had skirted around the topic of his family’s debt and mother’s deceit after the blowup at the hospital but Jake and Abby had teased it out of him eventually.  Bellamy had refused to disclose details, even to Clarke, but both her parents had reacted better than she’d been expecting, offering their help and issuing him and Octavia an open invitation to dinner or lunch any time they felt the need for company.

The table in the dining room is decked out in perfect dinner party style with more candles, their nicest tablecloth, and silver place settings for five spaced so evenly the measurements might as well have been made with a ruler.  Steaming plates of food sit on the table runner and Jake Griffin is just putting down a plate of steaks as they entered the room.

He greets Wells with a hearty handshake and slap on the back and they all sit down to eat.  Somehow, with the addition of two of her favorite people in the world, the room that Clarke had always hated above all other in this house, with its sterile white walls and carefully organized china cabinets, feels almost a little bit like home.

“We’re sorry we won’t be seeing your parents this time, Wells,” Abby says as she cuts into a piece of meat.

Next to her, Wells shrugs.  “Mom’s at a conference and you know how Dad is about leaving her with those ‘crusty academic types’ all by herself.”

All three Griffins chuckle.  Bellamy just smiled down at his plate and reached for the butter.

“He’s a good man,” Jake replies after a pause.

“So is this one,” Wells says.

The table freezes and looks up to find that he’s pointing at Bellamy.

Silence.

Bellamy’s turning red under his olive complexion and deep summer tan.  Under the table, Clarke squeezes his thigh.

“Of course,” Wells continues, “Clarke’s been talking about him all summer.”

She grinds her heel down onto his foot but other than a grimace, he gives no sign that he felt it.

“But I wasn’t sure he was good enough for her.  Protective best friend instincts and all that.”  He slings an arm around Clarke’s shoulder, yanking her in closer to him.  “But boy was I wrong.”

Clarke is fairly sure she’s never felt so mortified.  Her face is burning and she wants nothing more than to slide under the table and never come back out.  But Wells isn’t done.

“There are too many assholes who run in the circles our lot are in,” he says, serious now, “you’re lucky your daughter found one of the good ones.”

Jake is smiling as he reaches for his fork, a twinkling light in his eyes.  Abby, meanwhile, just stares at Wells like he’s grown a second head.

Clarke shrugs out from under Wells’ arm and looks to Bellamy.  The high color in his cheeks has faded a bit but the tips of his ears are still red.  He stares across the table at her mother with an almost challenging look on his face, one that dares her to say something, to bring up how in five years there won’t be a Harvard degree hanging on his wall, how he’ll never be one of them.

Instead, Abby swallows.  “Clarke has always been good at choosing well for herself,” she says and it sounds a little forced but Bellamy breaks their stare.

“So what did you kids do in the city today?” Jake asks.  “Bellamy, it was your first time in Boston right?”

“It was.  And Clarke was a great tour guide.”

He grins at her in that way that could replace the sun and she feels herself flushing all over again.

“Only because you let me drag you around everywhere with no complaints.”

His smile fades just the smallest amount until it’s just the barest upward tilt of his lips.  “What could I possibly have to complain about?” The  _ I was with you _ hangs unspoken in the air between them and Clarke’s blush deepens.

“All I remember of Tour Guide Clarke is that time she tried to drive us to Salem and somehow we ended up in Western Mass,” Wells interjects.

“I’ve never been good at reading signs and you know that,” she shoots back and he grins.

“It’s okay,” Bellamy says, “my mom and sister and I were on a vacation in California once and I was in charge of navigating and it took us an hour to realize that I’d been reading the map upside down.”

The table snorts.

“It was not my finest moment,” he deadpans but there’s that bright light in his eye that Clarke loves more than anything and she reaches over to take his hand.

He looks over at her, one eyebrow quirked in question and she just smiles, a bit overwhelmed.

_ I love you _ , she mouths and his smile widens, teeth flashing white against his tan.

He squeezes her hand.   _ Love you, too _ , he mouths back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come find me on [Tumblr!](http://andrevvminyard.tumblr.com)


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I like her,” Octavia tells the TV after a while.  
> On the screen he couple wanders through a nice-looking rambler. The wife is complaining about the paint color and Bellamy feels like his head is going to explode.  
> “She’s good for you.”  
> “What does that mean?” Bellamy asks cautiously.  
> Octavia’s folding one of her shirts and she stares down at it thoughtfully. “I don’t even know really. I just like the way you are when you’re with her.” She looks up at him. “It’s like she makes you realize that you don’t have to do everything yourself. She makes you let go.”  
> “Yeah,” he says finally, hating that his voice chokes a little. “I think you’re right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am literally the worst and fell off the wagon with posting this story. I hope you’ll all forgive me and as penance I’ll have the next three chapters posted within the next week and a half or so. Thank you, everyone, who has been following me and kept up with this story, I truly appreciate all of you so so much.

“Get that ridiculous grin off your face, big brother, you look like you’re twelve.”  The order is closely followed by a pair of balled up socks hitting him squarely in the forehead. **  
**

Bellamy rolls his eyes.  “I always knew I was going to regret letting you play softball,” he mutters back.

He’s rewarded with another volley.  This time it’s a pair of his boxers.

“If you’re going to be an ass, you can fold your own laundry.”

“Hey,” he scolds.  “I didn’t raise you to use that kind of language.”

She sticks her tongue out at him.

“Anyway, I don’t have a ridiculous grin.”

“Yes, you do.  It’s your ‘thinking about Clarke’ grin and it’s nauseating.”

He rolls his eyes again.  “Please.”

Octavia just shoots him a knowing grin and reaches for the remote, turning up the volume on _House Hunters_.

Wells had been in town for just over a week and his stay was wrapping up.  Bellamy, sometimes with the addition of Octavia, had spent almost every day over at the Griffins’ or out with Clarke and Wells and so he was leaving the two friends a last few hours together alone.  Plus he’d missed this a little, the casual sitting on the couch with his sister, watching crappy reality television that he claims to hate, trading well-intentioned insults.

“I like her,” Octavia tells the TV after a while.

On the screen he couple wanders through a nice-looking rambler.  The wife is complaining about the paint color and Bellamy feels like his head is going to explode.

“She’s good for you.”

“What does that mean?” Bellamy asks cautiously.

Octavia’s folding one of her shirts and she stares down at it thoughtfully.  “I don’t even know really.  I just like the way you are when you’re with her.”  She looks up at him. “It’s like she makes you realize that you don’t have to do everything yourself.  She makes you let go.”

“Yeah,” he says finally, hating that his voice chokes a little.  “I think you’re right.”

She drops the subject after that, asserting, “they’re going to pick house two.”

Bellamy frowns.  “But it didn’t have a backyard.”

“House two,” Octavia repeats, reaching into the laundry pile.

He rolls his eyes.  Next to him, his phone chirps.  Clarke’s name flashes across the screen.  He opens the text and smiles.

“Clarke and Wells got ice cream,” he tells his sister.

“Isn’t that nice,” she replies sarcastically.  “Thank you, Bellamy, for informing me of Clarke’s every move.”

“I didn’t—“

She tilts her head back to look at him, looking a little cross.  “Bell.  All afternoon it’s been ‘Clarke this’ and ‘Clarke’s doing that.’”

His cheeks heat.

She grins.  “It’s sickening but also a little endearing.”

Despite himself, he laughs. “They’re going to pick house three,” he tells her.  “The wife loved the kitchen.”

“You wanna bet?”

His eyebrows go up. “A week’s worth of chores.”

“You’re on.”

In typical HGTV fashion, the couple is wandering down a tree-lined lane, interwoven hands swinging between them, discussing their options.

“I just loved that kitchen,” the woman sighs and Bellamy grins.

“But the open floor plan of house two was incredible,” her husband counters. “We could watch the kids playing from every room.”

“And it did have great lighting.”

“But that backyard was just so small for the dog.”

They look at each other for a long moment as music swells in the background.

“House three?” she prompts and he nods.

“Mother—!” Octavia yells.

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Bellamy deadpans.  “I really don’t want to know how large your swear word vocabulary is.”

“98% of it is your fault.”

“I didn’t need to know that either.”

His phone chirps again.  Clarke, asking if he and O want to join her and Wells for dinner in town.  When he looks up, Octavia is studying him, brow furrowed.

“What?”

O gestures to his phone.  “What are you going to do when the summer’s over?”

It’s as if she’d dumped a bucket of ice water over his head.  “I don’t know, we haven’t talked about it yet.”

“It’s almost the end of July.”

“I know what the date is, O,” he says defensively.

She lifts her hands in a placating gestures.  “Just….things are going to chance.  You know that, right?  She’s going to go back to her fancy life and meet more fancy friends at Brown and you’ll go back to Virginia and do exactly what you were doing before this summer.”

“And who says that we can’t make it work?” he challenges.

“History.”

He swallows. “I thought you were over all this ‘Clarke is just using you as a distraction’ bullshit.”

“I am.  I don’t think you’re a distraction.  I’ve seen the way she looks at you.”

“Then what’s the—“

“The _problem_ ,” Octavia says loudly over him.  “Is that you’re eighteen years old, Bell, and after August you won’t be seeing each other all the time anymore.  Things change and people grow apart.”

“We’re going to make it work.”

She nods.  “I hope so.  Like I said, she’s good for you.”  She smiles at him softly.  “I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

He reaches out to ruffle her hair.  “Thanks, O,” is all he can think to say.

 

Wells went back to Boston on a Thursday and Aurora Blake was released from the hospital two days later.  Clarke had talked to Bellamy sporadically in the days after his mom went home and he’d said she was weak but doing okay.  According to him they still hadn’t talked about the blow up in Aurora’s hospital room.  Clarke, who had practically invented shoving conflicts with parents under the rug, understood.

She’s startled awake five days after Aurora went home by her phone chirping insistently at her from her bedside table.  She groans and rolls over, grabbing it and squinting at the screen.

_Bell: O and I are going mini golfing, you game?_

Clarke smiles and rolls out of bed.

The house is silent when she tiptoes downstairs, not surprising for such an early hour.  Her parents had both taken the week off work and were likely passed out upstairs after a night spent drinking too much champagne and laughing.  Clarke had made sure she was upstairs and in bed before they came home just to avoid the merrymaking.  Abby was still riding her hard about Brown and course selection and Clarke wasn’t in the mood.

She throws a couple pieces of toast in the toaster and warms up some bacon, chugging back a glass of orange juice before snagging her keys off the counter and sliding into her car.

She meets Bellamy and Octavia in the parking lot for Magic Mike’s Mini Golf, the only respectable course within a thirty minute radius, even if it was clown-themed and probably older than Bellamy, Clarke, and Octavia all put together.  The sign is a bit graying over the entrance to the main building but Clarke has always loved this place.  She and her father had made regular trips when she was a kid, oftentimes with Wells and his father.

Bellamy and Octavia are leaning across Bellamy’s car, seemingly engrossed in a conversation between them.  His hair is ruffling a bit in the slight breeze that’s shifting the hem of Octavia’s dress, the bright summer sun turning their matching eyes a dark chocolate brown in the shadows of their faces.

Octavia is the first to notice her and she raises a hand in greeting.  Her call of, “hey, Clarke!” wafts across the few lanes of empty parking spaces between them and perks Bellamy up.

He grins widely at her, hand reaching out before she’s even within reaching distance to wrap around her waist and pull her in for a quick peck.

“Hey,” he says and she grins back.

“Hey, yourself.”  Her smile slides to Octavia, who’s pretending to look nauseous.  “Hey, O.”

“Gross,” is all the younger girl replies with.

Bellamy grins wider and chucks the back of her hair, his hand sliding into Clarke’s.  “You ready to get your ass kicked?” he asks her and Clarke snorts.

“Please.  I’ve been playing this course since I was four.  You two assholes are going down.”

It turns out that when Bellamy had asked her if she was ready to get clobbered, he hadn’t been talking about himself.  He had been talking about his sister. Octavia Blake is astoundingly good at mini golf.  So good, that after her fifth hole in one in a row, Clarke has come to only one conclusion.

“Where’s the genie, Blake?” Clarke demands.

Octavia just slings her golf club over her shoulder, narrowly missing braining a passing preteen who squawks and runs away.  “A girl never shares her secrets, Griffin,” she replies cryptically as Bellamy lines up his shot.

Bellamy, meanwhile, is atrocious.  Clarke is honestly a bit surprised.  He seems like one of those carelessly jock type guys who played soccer in high school and like doing banal jock things like throwing frisbees and playing touch football in his spare time.  She’s also not quite sure where she got that idea.  But it doesn’t matter.  Bellamy misses half the shots he takes and the times he does manage to hit the ball, it often goes careening in the opposite direction.  At the sixth hole, Clarke and Octavia are forced to stand patiently on the path, making apologetic faces at the line building up behind them as Bellamy tries for his seventeenth shot.

Par was five.  Octavia had done it in three and Clarke in four.  After twenty, Bellamy’s lime green ball finally drops into the hole.

The sigh of relief from the crowd behind them almost has a presence.  Clarke grabs Bellamy’s arm and drags him away before he has the chance to notice.

Surprising no one, Octavia cleans the floor with both of them and Clarke’s too impressed to be angry.  Bellamy buys them all Cokes and they claim one of the grimy picnic tables behind the main building.

Clarke’s ankle wraps around Bellamy’s under the table.  Octavia takes slow sips from her drink, eyes unfocused and out on the course somewhere, watching a group’s progress.

Clarke’s the first to break the silence.  “How’s your mom?”  She asks it quietly, as if that would help temper the awkwardness of the situation.  Nevertheless, both Blake siblings tense, then relax.  But there’s still a tightness in Bellamy’s shoulders that Clarke wishes didn’t exist.

“She’s doing all right,” he says slowly.  There’s a long pause.  “Too tired to do much of anything.”

“And the hospital bills?”

“That’s a fun story,” Octavia mutters into her can and Bellamy shoots her an unreadable glance.

“Mom didn’t tell us about the cancer because it wasn’t responding well to other treatments,” he tells Clarke.  “Which you’d think is even more reason to tell your two kids and only family you’re dying, but whatever.”  There’s bitterness in his tone that makes Clarke reach out and put her hand over his.  He looks down, swallows.  She squeezes.

“But?” she prompts.

“But apparently there’s this new drug they’re testing.  The FDA just approved it for human trials a couple months ago.  And I guess we were in the right time at the right place because Mom’s doctor was able to get her into the trial.”

“Which means the drugs and all her treatment are free,” Octavia offers.

“That’s great,” Clarke tells them and Bellamy shrugs.

“Doesn’t erase the giant mountain of debt she left me with but at least we don’t have to worry about more of it.”  His laugh is bitter.  “We’ll sell the house at the end of the summer, that’ll take care of most of it.”

Clarke has been expecting this. Since Bellamy had told her about the bills, this possibility had been floating around in the back of her head.  The possibility of Bellamy and Octavia leaving.  Leaving Kennebunkport, going back to Virginia.  Leaving Clarke.

 _It would have happened anyway_ , a voice in the back of her head chides.

 _But this is permanent_ , she protests.

But then, where was her own guarantee that she was ever coming back to Kennebunkport?  Once she had managed to get out from Abby’s thumb and away from the world of rich society housewives and multi-million dollar houses, who said she would ever want to go back?

“Back to Virginia then?” she asks, trying to keep her tone light.

Bellamy nods absently.  “Yep.  O’s got a high school diploma to earn.”

“You’ll come visit us, right, Clarke?” Octavia prompts, eyes shining bright.

Clarke chokes on her answer.  Bellamy’s fingers tighten around hers and squeeze so hard she can feel her knuckles cracking.  “Of course,” she says.  “Of course I’ll come visit you.”

 

Bellamy goes over to the Griffins’ the next day.  Clarke had told him that her parents would be driving up to Portland for an overnight trip and he’d been hoping to avoid running into both of them.  Jake he didn’t mind but he was almost always followed or preceded by Abby, who though she was no longer looking at him like he was a piece of gum her daughter had scraped off the bottom of her shoe, still had a calculating look in her eye whenever she saw him.

Clarke had said that they were leaving around one, but clearly they’d gotten to a late start because they’re in the driveway, loading a wheeled suitcase into the back of Jake’s spotless Mercedes when Bellamy pulls into the driveway at 1:20.  His hands clench around the steering wheel as he coasts to a stop.  Jake waves to him, a wide grin breaking across his face like waves. Clarke’s nowhere in sight.

Bellamy turns off his car and slides out, wandering up the driveway.

“You here to hang out with Clarke?” Jake asks, slamming the trunk shut.

Bellamy nods.

“She’s in the backyard,” Abby tells him, meaning their stretch of private beach he and Octavia had once accidentally trespassed across.

“Great, thanks,” Bellamy says.  He shoves his hands deep into his pockets and kicks the asphalt of the driveway.

“We should get going, sweetie,” Jake prompts, hand on Abby’s back.  “Leave the young ones to their afternoon.”  He winks and Bellamy smiles back.  “Don’t have too much fun without us.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Bellamy jokes back.

He steps out of the way and watches as they get into the car.  It reverses out of the driveway with the smooth growl that Bellamy has come to associate with money.  He waits for a long unnecessary moment after the Mercedes disappears around the corner to snag the spare key out of the window boxes next to the front door and opens the door.

The house still feels too big to him but he knows it better now.  He doesn’t feel awkward and out of place walking down the hallway alone as he passes the closed door to Jake’s study and the sweeping grand staircase that goes up to the second floor.  He allows his eyes to trace the carpeted stairs and the careful molding of the bannister as he passes.  The upstairs is the one part of the house he’s never seen.  He squashes his temptation and pads into the living room.

True to Abby’s word, Clarke is stretched out on a towel on the beach a few feet from the stairs to the deck.  From his vantage point it looks like she’s only wearing a tank top and a pair of jeans she’d chopped into shorts earlier in the summer.  The sun glints off her hair, turning the blonde into liquid gold.

She tilts her head back when she hears the bang of the screen door and even though he can’t see it, he knows she’s smiling.

“You made it,” she says, happily, reaching up to grab his arm and pull him down.

Her mouth finds his and her lips are soft and taste vaguely of strawberries.  It’s a fast kiss but her tongue still slides past his just briefly before she pulls away, grinning, hand still tangled in his shirt sleeve.  He groans and sinks down next to her, leaning in for a second, longer kiss.

Her hand migrates to the back of his neck, sliding into the dark strands he’d let grow out a little, if only because she seemed to like playing with them so much.

“My parents are gone?” she asks into his mouth, biting down briefly on his lip.

“Ran into them in the driveway,” he breathes into her neck, sliding kisses down to her bare shoulder.  Her head tips back again.  She smells like roses.  “But yes.”

She hums and turns her nose into his hair.  “You smell nice.”

He laughs and she shivers at the brush of his breath across her neck.

“You eat lunch yet?  I made you a sandwich.”

He pulls away after a last kiss to her shoulder.  “No, I’ve been driving Octavia around all day.”

She hands him the sandwich and he slings an arm around her shoulder, pressing a kiss to her hair.

“You are the greatest girlfriend I’ve ever had.”

She leans into him for a second before pulling away and reaching for a second sandwich.  He takes a bite, freezes.  “Does this have…?”

“Extra mayo, just for you, you fucking heathen,” she tells the waves, and Bellamy grins.

They chew in silence for a long moment, not touching but with only inches between them on the towel.  Bellamy’s toes dig into the sand and he breathes in the smell of the ocean.  Gulls wheel overhead, calling to each other.  For just a moment, he allows himself to admit that he’s going to miss this when they leave.

He wonders if Clarke will bring up the overnight bag she’d told him to bring.  It was shoved into his backseat, sparsely packed with a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and his glasses.  She didn’t and neither did he, content to sit next to her on an empty beach, eating his sandwich.

They’d gotten good at silence over the few months of their relationship.  He figured they both needed it.  Bellamy had practically raised Octavia from even before he’d known that was what he was doing and she’d never been a quiet one.  Especially when she was younger she’d always been buzzing about this thing or that thing, this boy she liked or that activity they’d done at school that day.  And Clarke, Clarke lived in a world of loud talkers and posturing.  A summer in Kennebunkport had proved to him that high society types avoided silence to hide the deepest part of themselves, the parts they didn’t want anyone seeing.

He’s not sure how long they’re sitting out there before she speaks again, voice a little rusty with uncertainty.  “I don’t think I want to go to Brown.”

Bellamy chews his bite of sandwich and swallows slowly.  “Then don’t.”

She looks over at him.  He expects her to fight him on it, just like every other time they’ve had this conversation.  He expects her to say something about her family’s expectations, how it’s not that easy.  Instead, all he sees in her eyes is acceptance.

“I’ve told you before, Clarke,” he says carefully.  “And I’ll tell you again.  It doesn’t matter what your last name is or what your parents want you to do.  Live your life for you.”

She looks back out at the water.  A small smile plays around her lips.  “I already wrote the email telling them I changed my mind,” she tells the waves.  “I couldn’t send it though.  But I want to.”

“Have you told Abby?”

She snorts.  “Fuck no.  And I won’t until I’ve done it, until there’s no way she can take control of my life again.”

He reaches for her hand.  “I’m proud of you,” he tells her.

“It’s like you’ve been saying all summer,” she says softly. “It’s about time that I take control of my own life.”

“What are you going to do instead?” he asks.

She leans back on her hands, face pensive.  “I was thinking about backpacking my way through Europe.”

He nods.

“I want you to come with me.”

 

Clarke hadn’t thought this through.  The words has just popped into her head and she’d said them before she realized what they really meant.  But they’re hovering between her and Bellamy now and from the expression on his face you’d think she’d hit him.  She swallows.

“You want me to come to Europe with you?” he manages finally.

“I do.”  And she means it.  Now that she’s thinking about it, there’s nothing that she wants more than to wander the old and crumbling and winding streets of European city after city, climbing towers, looking out over rooftops, pacing silently through the cavernous halls of the continent’s great churches, leading him through the Louvre, past the famous exhibits of the Vatican Museum.  “Come with me to Europe, Bellamy.”

A wide grin spreads across his face and something warm blooms in her chest.

“I’m sure your mom would love that,” he teases and she slaps his arm.

“I don’t want to think about my mom right now.”

“Then what do you want to talk about?” he teases.  She bites her lip.

“You.  Me.  Us.”

His eyes darken and Clarke somehow feels more apprehensive about this than she did about asking her boyfriend of only a few months to follow her on a backpacking trip across another continent.

“Clarke,” he says slowly, “you know that I’m with you  right?  No matter what you do.  If you go to Brown, if you don’t, if you decide to live under a highway underpass.”  His eyes are serious, beseeching.  “I’m with you until you don’t want me anymore.”

“That’s good,” she breathes, “because I’m never going to not want you.”

She feels him grin against her lips as his mouth seals over hers again and this time the kiss tastes like a promise.

The breeze kicks up shortly after that and they migrate back inside.  Bellamy waits in the living room as Clarke puts their plates in the dishwasher and folds the towel they were sitting on before she jerks her head at him in a wordless request to follow her back into the hallway.

“Did you bring it?” she asks, suddenly apprehensive, even though she knows there’s no reason to.

Bellamy’s shoulders are a line of tension as he nods.  “Do you want me to…?” He gestures towards the door vaguely and she grins.

She drops down onto the second stair and nods.  “Yeah.  If you want to, that is.”

“For Christ’s sake, Griffin,” he replies, fondness coloring his tone and Clarke’s cheeks heat.  She looks away as she hears him unlock the door and open it.

He’s back in minutes, overnight bag slung over his shoulder, keys twisting around his finger.  It’s one of his nervous tics, she’s learned, and that somehow makes her feel even warmer towards him, the idea that he’s just as nervous about this as she is.

She reaches out for his hand and he lets her take it.  Their fingers weave together as she stands and starts up the stairs.

“I’m already intimidated by this fucking carpet,” Bellamy grumbles behind her and she grins.  “Seriously, how the fuck do you keep it this white?  I don’t even think this color is natural in nature.”

“You are a drama queen,” she tells him and she’s rewarded with a squeeze to her fingers.

“You knew that,” he reminds her.  And it’s true.

Until now Clarke has managed to avoid bringing Bellamy upstairs.  Not because it feels too personal but because she feels it exposes too much about her.  Bellamy sees through her like no one ever has and yet there were still those small parts of her that she kept so well guarded that not even he could break down the walls surrounding them.  This, she thinks as she pushed open her door, was her last surrender.  Her last stand.  And she isn’t even going to put up a fight.

Clarke’s room is at the end of the hall, past carefully framed and scientifically placed baby pictures and there her high school graduation, black cap sandwiched down securely over her hair, grinning and happy, Wells’ arm around her shoulder, the two of them clutching their diplomas, watching the world open up in front of them.

Clarke’s door is painted white like the rest of the ones off the hall, nondescript and plain, except for the scuff mark near the bottom, a remnant of her more rebellious pre-teen years.  She pushes it open slowly and looks back at Bellamy. He’s watching her, warmth in his eyes, the product of an emotion she doesn’t want to try to decipher for fear of changing her mind.  Instead, she steps inside and then to the side, and he follows her in, eyes sweeping over the walls.

She looks at the murals, at the constellations painted around her window, at the faded blue of the ceiling, and the massive cork board across from the door and tries to imagine how they must seem to Bellamy.  He takes slow steps to a wall and traces his fingers across the painted surface, following the twisting path of a bouquet of roses as they reach up in vain towards a painted sun.

“This is incredible,” he tells the wall.  “You did this?”

She nods.

There’s wonder in his eyes.  “Thank God you’re not going to med school.”

It seems so incongruous to the gravity of the moment that Clarke can’t help but snort out a laugh.  When Bellamy looks at her, he’s grinning.

“You’re amazing, Clarke Griffin.”

She bites down on her lip and looks away.

“I’m serious.  This…this is insane, I’ve never seen anything like it.”  She hears his footsteps again as he crosses the room, fingertips trailing over the patchwork quilt thrown hastily over the sheets she hadn’t bothered to make that morning, tracing the squares of fabric that made up her childhood.

“My dad’s mom gave me that quilt when I went into high school,” she blurts out.

“I have one like it,” he replies softly.  “It’s folded up in a trunk in the attic.”  He fingers one of the patches, black stitched with the vague outline of the Blink-182 logo.  “Even Clarke Griffin went through an emo phase, huh?”

“We’re all human,” she answers, flopping back on the bed and crossing her hands over her chest.

She doesn’t have to look at him to know that he’s grinning.  There’s a long silence as he takes in the rest of the room.  She thinks about the ticket stubs and photos and playbills stuck to her cork board.  What will he make of these pieces of her life that he didn’t and probably never will know about?

“You looked a lot like Abby when you were younger,” he comments and she turns her head to see that he’s inspecting a photo from her early middle school years.  She’s wearing absolutely too much denim and her hair was chopped short, just under her jawline, her cheeks chubby.

“Everyone always told me I looked like my dad.”

He tilts his head.  “It’s not the physical,” he says slowly. “It’s something in your eyes.”  He looks back at her, studying her face.  “I still see it.  The determination.  It’s one of the first things that drew me to you.”

She raises an eyebrow. “That I’m an asshole?”

“A lovable asshole.”

“Oh, good.  I was worried.”

She almost misses his quick intake of breath.  His footsteps have carried him to about Clarke’s bedside table and she doesn’t have to look up to know what he’s looking at.

“Clarke,” he breathes, and there’s something choked in his voice.

She does look up at him now, eyes finding his and finding a vulnerability there that she wasn’t expecting.  He’s holding the picture frame in a white-knuckled grip, eyes glued to it like he can’t believe what he’s seeing.

“I love that picture,” she says softly, sitting up and swinging her legs over onto his side of the bed.

“I’m on your bedside table,” he whispers and she smiles.

“Of course you are.”

He slowly, reverently, puts the picture frame back, adjusting it so it’s just right and Clarke’s eyes slip to it.  Bellamy in a worn t-shirt and boardshorts, can of soda in his hand, hair ruffled into an unruly mess by the sea breeze, eyes alight with the wild grin that’s splashed across his face.

“It’s the first thing I see every morning when I wake up,” she tells him honestly and something in his expression _breaks_.

“God, I love you,” he says and she holds out her hand to him.

He reaches for it like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver and she pulls him into her, over her, and this is Clarke’s home.

“I love you, too,” she whispers into the skin under his neck before pressing a long kiss there.

His exhale onto her shoulder is shaky but his hands are sure as they fist in the pillow on either side of her head.

“Clarke—“ he starts but she cuts him off.

“Yes.”

She’s fairly sure that she’s never seen him so serious.  “You’re sure.”

In answer she swiftly sits up and strips her shirt off, leaving her in only a polka dot bra and acres of pale skin.  His eyes trace over her collar bones, across her chest, down to her stomach, the waistline of her shorts.  It doesn’t matter how many times Clarke has worn a bikini in front of him but this feels different somehow, in an empty house, in the inner sanctum of her bedroom.

“God you’re beautiful,” he murmurs before leaning forward and capturing her lips with his.

She grins and leans back.  He follows her down, one hand sliding into her hair as the other traced down her side, the callouses on his fingers rough against her skin.

“I figured that would work,” she told the ceiling as his lips track a path across her cheek to her neck.

“You fight dirty, Griffin.”

“It’s not my fault teenage boys are ruled entirely by their hormones.”

She yanks him back by his hair, other hand sliding under his shirt to trace up his back.

“Right, like if I were to take my shirt off right now, you wouldn’t stare.”

She pulls back and grins, finding the mischievous glint in his eyes.

“I never said that.”

His answering grin sends a bolt of heat through her.  He pushes himself up and grabs his shirt by the collar, pulling it over his head in a smooth motion.  His hair is tousled and messy, the bright light in his eyes matched by a flush dark enough to show up under his dark tan and olive complexion.

Clarke lifts a hand and traces it down his chest, feeling out the muscles there.  She looks back up and him and grins.  “It’s okay, Bell, if a hot girl took her shirt off in front of me, I’d be speechless, too.”

“You,” he says, dropping back down and kissing her again. “Are the worst.”

She just laughs and twines a hand around the back of his neck.

His hands are slow and exploratory, tracing over every inch of bared skin with an almost reverent look in his eye that makes Clarke’s breath catch in her throat.  She’s far from new at this, she’s had boyfriends and girlfriends, but this is different.  No one has ever looked at her like that.

He flips her suddenly, hands spanning her hips, burning against hers, thumbs tracing against her waistband.  Her fingers feel clumsy to her as she reaches for the button on her shorts, popping it and shoving them down her legs.

Bellamy’s head is against her neck and she can feel his breathing, ghosting too fast puffs of air across her skin as he presses his lips under her ear.  “Clarke,” he says slowly, but it’s just a comment, not a question, not meant to be addressed.  Instead, she just traces her hands down his back, dizzy on the expanse of skin.  Hers to touch, hers to trace her nails down until he groans and kisses her again, biting her lip until she whimpers.

She loses her bra next, his fingers capable and adept, slipping the clasp and leaning down to lick across her collarbone.  The rest of their clothes don’t last much longer, strewn in matching piles across Clarke’s floor, and then it’s just hands and lips on skin, and their rushed breathing, and the rush of Clarke’s heartbeat in her ears.

And then there’s nothing but Clarke and Bellamy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come find me on [Tumblr!](http://andrevvminyard.tumblr.com)


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You know,” O says quietly, “when I first met you I thought you were going to break his heart.”  
> “I know,” she says softly.  
> “Sometimes I wish we hadn’t come here,” Octavia admits.  
> Clarke swallows against the tightening in her throat and leans her head down against Octavia’s. She closes her eyes. “I know that, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everyone who is still here with this story, reading and leaving comments and kudos, thank you. Thank you thank you thank you. Depending on my work schedule and other factors, I'm going to try to have the last two chapters up within the week.

Bellamy wakes to the feeling of someone tapping out an uneven rhythm on his forearm.  He grins into the pillow, blinks a few times, and turns to look at Clarke.  She’s propped up on one elbow, hair falling down around her face like a curtain, catching the morning light streaming in the window at just the right angle to set it aflame.

“Morning,” she says, voice still a bit rough.

His grin widens.  “Good morning.”

He leans forward to kiss her and she smiles against his lips.  “You sleep well?”

He hums and reaches out to run a hand down her arm.  Goosebumps erupt on her skin.  “Exceptionally well.”

She scoots closer, sliding neatly into the space between the edge of the pillow and him, sandwiching a hand under his side and fitting her head under his chin.  “Good,” she mumbles into his chest.  He can feel the brush of her eyelashes against his skin as they close and her soft even breaths as she slips back into unconsciousness.

Bellamy curves an arm around her bare shoulders and tucks his head down against the crown of her head, inhaling the smell of roses.  His eyes close and he just breathes her in, traces a hand against her shoulder blade, and wonders.  Wonders how despite everything, he’s allowed to have this, to have her.

_ I love you _ , he thinks and she struggles closer, nosing against his shoulder.   _ So much _ .

The next time he wakes, Clarke’s gone, but the sheets are still warm and the door’s open just a crack.  He can hear what sounds vaguely like 2000s middle school dance music wafting down the hallway.

He sits up and stretches his arms over his head, eyes finding the window across from her bed.  The waves crash on the beach as gulls soar overhead, screeching back and forth to each other.  The sun is high in the sky.  The red digits on Clarke’s alarm blink 11:25 at him.

Downstairs, Britney Spears is accompanied by the sound of sizzling bacon and the smell of scrambled eggs.  Clarke’s in the kitchen, sliding across the floor on socked feet waving a spatula as a conductor’s baton.  He leans against the wall and crosses his arms, smiling.

Clarke executes a dramatic spin and freezes, eyes catching on him.

“I didn’t hear you come downstairs,” she says and he grins.

“Good thing or I would have missed that.”

Her lips tug up in a small smile.  “Don’t make fun.”

He crosses the room to her and kisses her briefly.  “Never.”

She points to the kitchen table with the spatula and orders, “go sit down, these’ll be done in a minute.”

There’s already a steaming plate of pancakes set in between two place settings, the butter, and a bottle of syrup.  Bellamy takes one of the chairs and watches as Clarke takes the bacon and eggs out of the pan and sits down across from him.  He’s struck by how easy this is, how natural it feels.  He swallows.

“I didn’t know you could cook,” he observes.

“Don’t flatter me yet, you haven’t tried them.”

“Are you kidding?  These are some of the greatest looking pancakes I’ve ever seen.”

She ducks her head and shovels some eggs onto her plate.  “I had to learn while my dad was in the hospital.  It was either that or designer frozen meals.”

Bellamy makes a face.  “What do those even look like?”

Her nose wrinkles.  “It’s exactly what you think except with shit like quinoa and buckwheat flour and no gluten.  Mom went on a health kick after Dad’s diagnosis.”

“Yikes.”

She nods and upends the syrup over her pancake, thoroughly dousing it.

“Had an effect on you, I see.”

She grins.

“When are they supposed to be back?”

She shrugs.  “Not until late.  How long is O going to be at her friend’s house?”

“She texted me this morning saying she wants to stay until dinner.  So I’m all yours for the afternoon.”

“Good,” she says softly, sipping at her water and smiling.

 

Clarke takes Octavia to the beach a couple days later.  Bellamy had been planning on going with them, but a doctor appointment for Aurora had cropped up last minute.  Bellamy had taken up going to them, if only to get details out of Aurora’s doctor that she was hesitant to share with him.

In Clarke’s experience, August tended to be the most crowded month for beaches.  The sands were choked full of students trying to soak up the last of their summer vacation and tourists desperate for those last rays of sun to add to their tan.  Luckily, she and Octavia managed to find an empty spot ideally spaced from the shore to set up.

Octavia’s stretched out on her stomach, flipping through a book, sunglasses down over her eyes.  Clarke’s just happy to watch the toddlers splash in the shallows and teenage couples laugh, drunk on young love.

She cracks open a can of soda and takes a long sip, digging her bare toes into the sand.

“Bellamy told me you’re not going to Brown,” Octavia says after they’ve been there for nearly an hour.

Clarke takes another sip, thinking over her answer.  She’d sent the email she’d drafted the day after Bellamy slept over, his hand on her shoulder and reassuring words in her ear.  She’d heard back later that day in an email from the admissions department saying they were sorry to see someone of her caliber leaving their incoming class but if she wanted it, a space would be held for her for the next fall.  She hadn’t bothered replying.

She couldn’t have pinpointed the exact moment but four years spent on a tree-lined quad, ducking in and out of brick buildings, surrounded by the best and brightest youth of tomorrow had lost its gleam.  Maybe it had never had it in the first place.  Now when Clarke thought of her future she saw cobblestones and ancient leaning buildings and a sea of new languages.  She saw a pencil on paper, tracing the spires of Notre Dame or Il Duomo or boats chugging their way up the Seine.

“Does your mom know yet?”

“She found my course catalog in the recycling bin and demanded answers. She’s not very happy.”

Octavia’s grin is wide.  “Good.”

Clarke laughs.

“It’s about time someone fucked up her grand plan for the rest of the universe.”

“I think the whole universe might be a bit broad,” Clarke muses.

Octavia shoves her shoulder.

“Careful, or I’ll tell your brother that you swear when he’s not around.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

Clarke just smiles out at the water and takes another sip of her soda.

“So where are you going to go?”

Clarke bites her lip.  “My birthday’s in a week and a half so I’ll have access to my trust fund.”

Octavia stiffens next to her and Clarke pretends not to notice.

“I figured that I might as well use the money for something that I want.  The more it pisses my mom off the better.”

That earns her a smile.

“I was just going to print out a map of Europe and blindfold myself and pick a country.  Buy myself a plane ticket and go.”  She doesn’t say how hopefully she’ll be buying two plane tickets.  How hopefully Bellamy will be there with her on that trans-Atlantic flight.

“And my brother?”

“We’ll figure something out.”

Octavia hums.

“I know he has a plan.”

Octavia smiles again.  “Of course he does.  It’s Bellamy.  He has contingency plans for his contingency plans.”

They fall into a companionable silence.  Octavia leans her head against Clarke’s shoulder.

“You know,” O says quietly, “when I first met you I thought you were going to break his heart.”

“I know,” she says softly.

“Sometimes I wish we hadn’t come here,” Octavia admits.

Clarke swallows against the tightening in her throat and leans her head down against Octavia’s.  She closes her eyes.  “I know that, too.”

 

“Bellamy!”

He’s barely out of his car and Abby’s already calling to him, wearing a wide smile and a pair of dirt-stained gardening gloves.  She never looks at him like that.

“Hey, Abby,” he says cautiously.

She strides up the driveway towards him, subtly intercepting him before he can reach the door.  “I wanted to talk to you about something,” she says, stripping off the gloves and pushing her hair out of her face. “About Clarke.”

Bellamy freezes.  He tries to rearrange his face into something open and pleasant.

“I’m sure she told you about abdicating Brown.”

“Yes,” he says slowly.

“I’ve tried talking to her about it.” She waves a hand airily, like this is nothing, just a simple conversation, but Bellamy’s spent enough time around the Griffins to recognize that steelcut look in her eye.  He’s on shaky ground here.  “But she just won’t see reason.”

“And you want me to try and convince her?” he guesses.

She beams.  “Would you?”

“I don’t think Clarke is going to listen to me.  She’s made up her mind.”

“Bellamy,” she says, dropping her voice and reaching out for his shoulder.  “If anyone can convince my daughter to drop this ridiculous plan of hers, it’s you.”

He just stares back at her.

“Surely you of all people can understand how she’s throwing away her future?”

_ No, _ Bellamy wants to snap back.   _ She’s throwing away the future you made for her _ .

“I’ll try my best,” he says stiffly and she beams at him.  “I knew I could count on you, Bellamy, thank you.”  The relief is plain in her voice.  It makes Bellamy’s skin crawl.

He just smiles and brushes past her to the front door.  He takes the stairs two at a time and rushes down the hallway to Clarke’s room, almost afraid that if he moves too slowly Abby will follow him and attempt to hatch some other scheme.

Clarke is sitting cross-legged on her bed, scrolling through something on her laptop.  When she sees him, she snaps it shut and grins.

“Hey!”  Her voice is warm.  Then she sees the look on his face and the smile slides off.  “What’s wrong?”

He crawls onto the bed next to her and flops onto her pillows.  One of her hands comes up to run through his hair.  “Your mother just tried to recruit me to convince you to go to Brown.”

Clarke’s fingers still in his hair.  “She what?” Her voice is sharp, like the edge of a knife.

“She probably thinks I’m up here extolling all the reasons why an Ivy League education will help you further your lot in life.”

Clarke’s hand tightens, sending small pinpricks of pain skittering across his scalp.

“She has no fucking right,” she hisses.

“Clarke, it’s fine.  I’ll just tell her I couldn’t sway you.”

“It’s not  _ fine _ , Bellamy.  She can’t just stomp into my life whenever she fucking feels like it and pull on strings like we’re her marionettes.”

She’s off the bed in an instant and halfway across the room before he registers she’d moved at all.  She’s in the hallway by the time he’s able to follow her and he catches her wrist, spinning her back around.

“What are you going to do?” he hisses at her.  “Just think, Clarke--if you let her think she won she’s off your back.  Your birthday’s in a week and you can be gone in a month.  You don’t have to do this.”  He gestures to the space between them.

Her expression hardens.  “I don’t care if it’s _easier_ _.   _ She doesn’t get to win, Bellamy.  And the man who confronted his mother in that hospital room would get that.”  She rips her wrist out of his grip and storms down the stairs, leaving him shocked in her wake.

He’s still hovering in the hallway when the shouting starts.

“What the  _ fuck  _ do you think you’re doing?” Clarke demands.

“Clarke, mind your language!” is Abby’s sharp retort.

“Right, because you clearly have a very clear idea of where the lines are in this relationship.”

“Clarke, honey, what on earth are you talking about?”

“I”m talking about how you’re trying to use my own boyfriend as a weapon against me.”

Silence follows.

“I didn’t--”

“You didn’t what, Mom?  Try to recruit Bellamy to convince me to go to Brown?  Completely disregard any and all agency I have over my own life?”

“I think you’re overreacting.”  But Abby’s voice is steely now.

“Oh, am I?” Clarke laughs.  “I don’t think so.  You know what I do think?”

“What?”

“I think that you’ve been controlling my life for too long.  And I think that it’s my turn to say  _ fuck.  You. _ ”

“Clarke!”

“Tell me it’s not true.  Tell me you’re not trying to shape me into a perfect mini-you who will go on to make you and Dad proud while I’m dying on the inside.”

“Brown is your only shot at a future, Clarke, and I don’t understand why you don’t see that!”

“Because it’s not true!  I don’t need Brown!  I don’t need Harvard med!  I don’t need any of this bullshit!  There isn’t only one way to live.”

“So you’re going to what?”  Abby sneers.  “Take a year off?  Move to Virginia with Bellamy?  And what will that do, Clarke?  Where will you be in three years when you realize that he has no motivation, no drive, and isn’t going to go anywhere?  Where will you be when you’ve used up your trust fund trying to support the both of you and you’ve gotten nothing in return?  What will you do then?”

Bellamy feels like he might be sick.  He falls hard against the wall, a hand pressed over his mouth.

When Clarke speaks again, her voice is deadly cold.  “Bellamy is one of the most hardworking and strongest people I’ve ever met.  And it just goes to show how blind you are that you can’t see past his class.  You disgust me.”

“Clarke!  Clarke, don’t you walk away from me!”

Clarke thunders up the stairs.  Her expression is a brewing storm as she brushes past Bellamy and slams into her room.  He follows her in a daze.  She’s got a duffel on the bed and is throwing clothes into it randomly, grabbing things out of drawers and her closet and shoving it down.

“Can I stay with you for a few days?”

“Clarke, what the hell are you doing?”

“I can’t be here anymore.”  She looks up at him, her hands still, and her shoulders fall.  “I can’t be here.”

Wordlessly he holds out his hand.  “Give me the bag, Clarke.”

She does and he slings it over his shoulder.

“Let’s go.”

The relief that breaks across her face almost brings him to tears.

 

Clarke’s phone rings in the middle of dinner and she excuses herself to take it, slipping out into the hallway, leaving Bellamy and Octavia at the table.  Aurora is apparently at her bi-weekly book club, just another front that everything is normal.

“Dad, hey,” she says into the phone.  “I, umm, I’m sorry.”  She swallows.

“Are you okay, Clarke?”

“Yeah, I’m...I’m fine, I guess.”

“Your mother is very not impressed.”

Clarke snorts.  “Did you call me to yell at me?”

She can hear the smile in his voice as he replies, “no, I called to tell you how proud I am of you.  And to tell you that I just put your mother on a train back to Boston.”

Clarke sucks in a deep breath.  “You what?”

“She’s going back to the Cape.  I told her that if she isn’t willing to respect your choices, then I didn’t want you two in the same place.  And there’s no reason to displace you from your home simply because you want to make your own decisions about your life.”

Clarke starts laughing, a sound so desperate it almost sounds like wheezing.  From the next room there’s the distinct sound of chairs squealing back against wood and Bellamy and Octavia’s footsteps.  Clarke slides down the wall, clutching her phone to her ear.

“You can come home whenever you like, Clarke, I’ll be here.”

“Thank you,” she whispers.

“I love you, honey.”

“Love you, too.”

There’s a click on the other end as Jake hangs up but Clarke’s trembling too much to take her phone away from her ear.  Bellamy slips it out of her hand and turns her face towards him.

“Clarke?  Is everything okay?”

She laughs again.  “My dad just kicked my mom out of the house.”  It sounds more real.

“ _ He what?”  _ Octavia demands.

“I guess she told him about the fight,” Clarke tells Bellamy, eyes tight on his.  “And he kicked her out.”

Now Bellamy’s the one who laughs and he crouches in front of her to pull her into a tight hug.

“I can go home,” she tells the curve of his neck.  She can feel his smile against her cheek as he squeezes her tighter.

“Do you want me to drive you?”

“Can I stay here tonight?  I don’t know if I’m ready to go back yet.”

“Of course,” he whispers.  “Of course.”

 

That night, as Clarke sleeps soundly beside him, Bellamy stares up at the ceiling hands crossed over his chest.  He can’t believe that he’d ever believed her life was easy and carefree just like he can’t believe that he had ever thought his family could weather any storm after their made it through the hurricane of his father leaving.

Clarke is stronger than he ever could have imagined and he’s weaker than he’d ever let himself believe.

There’s a wrapped present in his closet with Clarke’s name on it, waiting to be gifted to her in just six days for her eighteenth birthday.  August 14th, the day that everything changes.  The day that Clarke gets access to her trust fund.  The day that Clarke books a one way ticket across the Atlantic.  The day that Bellamy Blake finally has to come down from the clouds and cement his feet back to the ground.

Octavia had seen it before he ever could have thought it.  Clarke wasn’t like them and she never would be.  But that didn’t mean that Bellamy couldn’t dream of a space where they merged their two worlds in the middle.  Surely this entire summer was proof of that.

He rolls over and traces his eyes down her cheek, over the curve of her jaw, down her neck to her shoulders.  He falls asleep like that, with his eyes trained on her and his thoughts running wild with scenarios that will never come to fruition except for in his dreams.

Once again, he wakes after she does to an empty bed and only the lingering scent of roses and her unzipped duffle to remind him that she’d been there at all.

He finds her and his sister on the couch watching Disney Channel over bowls of cereal in their pajamas.  He has to stop, just for a minute, hovering in the doorway, watching them, struck by how much this moment is and what it means.

Aurora’s shoes are by the front door which means she’d stumbled home last night late after they’d all gone to sleep and will probably sleep most of the day away.  The trial drugs they’d put her on make her tired and Bellamy rarely sees her anymore outside of the doctor’s appointments he drives her to and from.

“Morning,” he says to the two girls as he crosses in front of them on his way to the kitchen in search of breakfast of his own.

“Morning, Bell,” Octavia calls back.  Clarke just smiles.

“Octavia talked me into watching Disney Channel for the first time since I was in middle school,” Clarke tells him when he sandwiches himself in between the two of them.  “I’m slightly ashamed to say that I’m enjoying it more than I was expecting.”

“Tell me about it.”

Octavia elbows him.  “You’re never too old for Disney,” his sister retorts, chomping down on a giant spoonful of Lucky Charms.

“Are you planning on going back today?” Bellamy asks Clarke and she shrugs.

“Probably.  I don’t want to leave my dad alone too long.”

He nods.  “Probably good.  There’s a realtor coming over this afternoon to appraise the house.”

Clarke nods.  “You’re still staying until the end of August?”

“Absolutely.”

She nods again.  “Good.”

Bellamy puts an arm around her shoulder and tugs her in close.  He presses a kiss to the top of her head and feels her relax slightly.

“And your mom?” she asks.

“She’s staying here, I think,” Bellamy replies. “We’ll check her into the hospital permanently.”

“Enough depressing shit, I’m trying to enjoy my show,” Octavia gripes from his other side.

They both laugh and Clarke takes another bite of his cereal.  Bellamy traces patterns into her shoulder and feels her shift just slightly closer.

They spend most of the morning lazing around the house in front of the television, battling Octavia over the remote.  Clarke finally manages to pry it out of her hands and finds a  _ Project Runway _ marathon.  They order pizza around one thirty and between the three of them, devour it.

Then Clarke’s pushing herself off the couch and slipping upstairs to repack her bag.  She hugs Octavia in the living room and follows Bellamy to the front door.  She jams her feet into her shoes and opens the door, quirking an eyebrow at him in an invitation to follow her out to her car.

He does, bare feet burning against the hot asphalt of the driveway.

“If you need to come back for another night, just let me know, okay?” he says after she dumps her bag in the backseat.

“I will.  Thanks, Bellamy.”  She takes a deep breath.  “For putting up with all this bullshit with my mom.”

“Of course.”

She folds into his arms, arms sliding around his waist and hands cinching into the fabric of his shirt.  He presses a lingering kiss to her lips as she pulls away and she smiles.

“I’ll see you soon, yeah?”

“You’re not getting rid of me this easily, Griffin.”

She grins and slides into the driver’s seat.  The engine coughs to life and she waves once, wearing a shy smile, before reversing out of the driveway.  He watches her go, feeling a sinking feeling in his stomach that he can’t identify the source of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come find me on [Tumblr!](http://andrevvminyard.tumblr.com)


	11. Chapter 11

Everything comes to a head on August 15th, the day after Clarke’s 18th birthday.

She’d spent the afternoon with Bellamy and Octavia, Skyped Wells and his girlfriend, Raven, gone to dinner with her father, exchanged a series of awkward texts with Abby, and found Bellamy waiting for her on her bed with his present for her, what he called the “Clarke Goes to Europe Starter Pack.”  She’d cried.

Now she sits on her bed with Bellamy, a map of Europe spread between them, running her fingers over the scarf she’d randomly selected out of her closet.

“Your big moment,” Bellamy jokes but there’s a current under his voice.

Her laptop is next to her, open to Expedia.  The dates are already put in, as is her departure city: New York.  Shortly after Abby had gone back to the Cape, Clarke had decided to spend a few days with Jake at the New York townhouse he keeps for work before leaving for Europe.  All she needs now is where she’s going.

“You ready?” Bellamy asks quietly, reaching out to rub his thumb in small circles against her knee.

She nods and raises the scarf, looping it over her eyes.  Bellamy slides a pen into her hand and she swings it over the paper a few times.  Then she drops it down.

“Good choice,” Bellamy says and she can hear a smile in his voice.

She strips off the blindfold one handed and looks down.  The tip of the pen is bleeding ink into the small dot marked Berlin.

“Germany,” she breathes.  “Okay.”

Bellamy grabs her computer and enters the city, clicks send.  Flights populate the screen.  Clarke feels like her heart is going to pound out of her chest.  In just a few clicks, she’ll have done it: defied her mother, changed her path, made her own decision about life.

“I’ve heard it’s beautiful,” Bellamy says carefully.  “You’ll have to send me pictures.”

Clarke’s eyes flash up to his.  She feels as though she’s rounding the top of the biggest drop on the roller coaster, hands clenched on the safety bar, waiting for that big drop, the sensation of your stomach being left behind eighty feet above you.

“Pictures,” she repeats.

He spreads his hands, shrugs.  “I can’t, Clarke.  I can’t.”

“You said you’d come with me.”

He chews his lip.  “No, I actually didn’t.”

Clarke thinks back to that conversation.

_ I want you to come with me _ , she’d told him.

And he’d been shocked, and honored, and she’d seen something in this eyes that said he wanted to.  But he was right.  He’d never said he would.

“But--” She stops.

“I can’t,” he repeats.  “I want to, God, I want to. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted something so much.  But…” He sucks in a deep breath.  “I just can’t.”

“Haven’t you been telling me all summer that sometimes you just have to make a decision and go for it?”

Bellamy runs a hand through his hair, clutching tight, the skin of his forehead going white.  “I have responsibilities, Clarke!  We can’t all just pack up and leave the fucking country whenever we want to!”

She stares at him, dumbstruck.

“Shit,” he mutters.  “I...I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then how did you mean it?” Her voice is colder than she’d probably prefer but she doesn’t bother to smooth over the jagged edges of her tone.

“I have Octavia, Clarke.  She’s fifteen, for fuck’s sake.  And who the hell knows how much longer our mom is going to be around.  Not that it even matters, she’s staying here and even if she wasn’t, I don’t trust her with O.   Especially not so that I can go prance around Europe.”

Clarke swallows.  The words hurt, they’re cutting deep, the twisting jabs of a dull blade.  But she knows he’s right.  Somehow she’d always known that it would come down to this.  The Blake sibling loyalty.

“What will you do?” she asks, her voice softer.

He looks up at her, eyes vulnerable and sad.  “Go home.  Take that year off.  Get a couple jobs.  Hopefully go to community college next year.  Get myself a degree.  Get Octavia into school.  Reevaluate.”

Clarke swallows against the tears rising at the back of her eyes.  “You don’t deserve this, Bell.”

“And you don’t deserve a mother who doesn’t give a shit about what you want.”  He shrugs.  “We don’t always get what we deserve.”

“I thought we were both going to get out of here.  Together.”

He loops their fingers together.  “I wanted that, Clarke.  I still do.”

“But there are more important things.”

He leans forward and kisses her forehead.  “I have to take care of my sister.”

She nods.  “I know.”

“Okay,” he whispers.  And leans his head down on hers.  She stares down at their fingers, tangled together like she’d hoped their lives would be, and lets the first of the tears fall, splashing down on his thumb.

Mercifully, he doesn’t say anything.

 

Bellamy had never hated hospitals until Aurora Blake got cancer.  Now he spends at least two days a week in one, sitting in an uncomfortable chair across from a kindly, grandfatherly-looking man who Bellamy knows he should like.  Instead, he just wants to punch him.

“Your mother is doing spectacularly, Bellamy,” Dr. Cooke tells him now.  “Really wonderfully.”

Bellamy’s not sure what Cooke’s idea of “really wonderfully” is but it doesn’t match up with Bellamy’s.

“My sister and I will be leaving the state in about two weeks,” he tells the doctor.  “Last week you said you were firming up plans for my mother’s permanent check in to the hospital.”

Cooke nods and roots around in one of his desk drawers, pulling out some paperwork.  “It’s all here.  You’re welcome to take this home and look it over if you’d like.”

“I just have to sign it?”

Cooke nods.  Bellamy takes a pen off his desk and scribbles his name on the dotted line.  Cooke stares, mouth gaping.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Bellamy says as he stands. “Keep me up to date with her progress.”

Octavia’s in the passenger seat of his car, playing Trivia Crack on her phone.  As he slides into the passenger seat she curses.  His phone vibrates in his pocket.

“Your turn.”

“Sports?” he guesses.

“Fucking sports,” she acknowledges.

For once he doesn’t bother correcting her language.

“We still meeting Clarke for lunch?” she asks as they pull out of the parking lot.

He nods.

“How are you two doing?”

Bellamy’s hands clench on the wheel.  “We’re fine, O.”

“Bellamy.”

“We are.  Honestly.”

And it’s true.  There had been a few days of requisite awkwardness but two days after Clarke had bought her plane ticket, after two days of them tiptoeing around each other, Clarke had shown up at his front door wearing an angry expression and a declaration on her lips.

“We can’t do this,” she’d told him.  “We have two weeks left together and like hell if I’m going to let us waste them with this bullshit.”

It was incorrect to say that things had returned to their carefree normal from before, back when Clarke had thought he was going with her to Europe and Bellamy hadn’t been able to admit just how locked in stone his future was.

“Kind of ironic, isn’t it,” Octavia muses, “that I was always angry at them for posturing.  And really, it’s us.  We’re the real liars here.”

“You and I are not liars, Octavia,” Bellamy says quietly.  “Don’t ever let them make you think we are.”

“Are you going to be okay?” she asks after a long silence.  “With all of this?”

“I have to be.”

She scoffs.  “Don’t put on that strong act for me.  It’s not doing either of us any favors.”

He looks over at her.  “It’s not for you,” he tells her as they merge onto the highway.  “It’s for me.”

 

It’s funny, Clarke thinks, how everything in this town always seems to come down to the beach.

It was the first part of Kennebunkport she fell in love with, it was the place that grounded her.  It was the place where, all those months ago, she saw Bellamy and Octavia together for the first time, without the yoke of civilized society that they thought they had to wear.

Now she’s standing in the shallows, sand wet under her feet, waves rushing over her toes, the hemline of her cocktail dress brushing around her knees.

The date is August 27th.

Tonight is the last major event on the Kennebunkport River Club’s summer schedule.  Tomorrow Clarke gets into a car with her father and drives out of Maine for what might be the last time.  Tonight, Bellamy and Octavia Blake are packing up Bellamy’s car and driving back to Virginia.  Tonight, Clarke will say goodbye to the person who had carved out a piece of her heart so big that she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to fill it in again.

The evening air is cool against her skin, which feels feverish to the touch.  Her hair is pinned up into a sweeping updo, her makeup is flawless, her dress ironed to perfection.  As always, on the outside Clarke Griffin looks like the pinnacle of high society.  On the inside, she is a rioting mass.  She wants to get in her car and drive and drive and drive.  Pick a highway and go until she runs out of gas and then get out and walk until her feet gave out.  But she’s promised Jake that she would put in one last appearance.  And she’d promised Bellamy she’d say goodbye.

Even if the idea of looking him in the eye for the last time makes her want to dive into the waves and never come up for air.

 

Bellamy is only here because he knows that Clarke will be.  But standing in the foyer of the Kennebunkport River Club, wearing semi-formal clothes that still make him feel itchy under the collar, he wishes he didn’t have to be.

Aurora was checked in and settled in her new permanent hospital room.  His and Octavia’s things were packed into boxes and suitcases in the front hallway, ready to be transferred into his car and driven home, back to Virginia.  The house was sold to a retiring couple from Pennsylvania for enough money to seriously deplete the pile of debt Aurora Blake had left for her only son to manage.  Everything has fallen into place, and yet Bellamy still feels like none of this is right.

He’s been chain eating skewered shrimp for the last twenty minutes, just to give himself something to do.  Octavia had vanished immediately after their arrival, he guessed to go track down the few friends she’d made over the summer to say goodbye.  The four of them had already planned a trip down to DC for Christmas break.  This wasn’t going to be goodbye for them.

The smell of roses precedes the familiar hand on his arm and he turns, one arm reaching for the familiar curve of Clarke’s waist.  He barely notices the deep blue of her dress or the fancy twists of her hair before he’s burying his face in her neck and her head is dropping to his shoulder, arms cinching tight around his waist.

“Hi,” she whispers into his hair.

“Hey,” he manages back and even to him, his voice sounds choked.

“Everything ready to go?” she asks.

“Yeah.”  A pause.  “But I wish it wasn’t.”

She laughs, a shaky sound that makes his hands tighten on her hips.

They pull away from each other but her arms remain linked around his neck, his solidly on her waist.

“This can’t be goodbye forever,” she says but it sounds more like she’s trying to convince herself.  “We could--”

“We talked about it, Clarke, you know we did.”

She bites down hard on her lip, looks away.  Nods.

It had been late, about a week after Clarke had booked her tickets.  They’d been lying side by side in Clarke’s bed, his fingers tracing nonsensical patterns down her arms as her eyes lingered over his face.

“We could try to do long distance,” she’d said suddenly, startling him.

“We could,” he’d acknowledged.

“But,” she said and he’d forced himself to look at her.

“But how could that ever work?”

She’d stayed silent and he’d sighed, rolling over onto his back.  He’d heard the sheets shifting, Clarke rolling up onto her elbow to look down at him.

“We’ve been fighting it since we got here and for a while there I thought we were winning, but we’re from different worlds, Clarke.”

She opened her mouth to say something but he put a finger to her lips, softly, just a barely there pressure.

“I don’t resent you.  There’s no point in it.  It’s no more your fault than mine that this is where we ended up.  But I don’t think I can be with you and see you doing everything you’ve dreamed of while I’m working three jobs and taking community college classes at night just so that my sister can be a normal teenager.”

A tear had spilled down Clarke’s cheek at that and she traced a hand down his cheek.  “I’m so sorry, Bellamy.”

“I know.”

“If I could take you both with me….if that was an option.”

He’d looked over at her and smiled sadly.  “If that was ever on the table, we would already be there.”

“I don’t regret a single second of it,” she tells his collar.  “I want you to know that.”

“I know,” he tells her.  “And, Clarke...this summer has been incredible.  You’re incredible.”

She looks up.  “I love you,” she tells him with such bare honestly that he feels his heart constrict.  “So much.”

He nods, taking a moment to bring back his composure.  “There will always be a part of me who will never stop loving you.”

She nods and hesitates, then swiftly leans up on her tiptoes and seals their mouths together.

Bellamy had thought that their first kiss tasted like promise, like youth, like hope.  This one is bittersweet.  There’s something lingering under the surface, like maybe a promise.  A promise that someday none of this will matter, that they’ll be on equal footing again, whether someday is next year or in twenty, they’ll find their way back together.

She pulls away first.  Bellamy blinks down at her as she stares up at him, eyes wide, lips still parted.

“Remember me,” she whispers.

He takes her hand and presses it over his heart.  “Always,” he vows.

She nods.

He makes himself turn away and weaves back through the crowd.  Octavia catches his arm, squeezing.

“Is it over?” she asks.

He nods.  “Yeah,” he manages.

“Okay, big brother.”  She heaves a sigh.  “Let’s go home.”

She tucks her arm through his elbow and takes the lead, tugging him out of the crowded ballroom. As they pass the flung open double doors to the patio something makes him look to his left.  The ocean rocks gently against the horizon of a vivid sunset, reds and oranges and yellows splashed against the darkness of the sky.  A solitary figure stands, shoulders thrown back, head held high, at the railing watching the boats shift in the marina.

He doesn’t need the glint of her golden hair to tell him it’s Clarke.  She doesn’t turn around and he doesn’t pause, just watches the slide of the shadows across her back until the crowd hides her from view.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She strikes another match and takes a deep breath. She takes a second candle and holds it up.
> 
> “For Bellamy,” she whispers. “I will always remember you.”
> 
> The twin flames flicker and Clarke forces herself to turn away.

She’s in Florence when she gets the letter.

It’s a little torn around the edges and there are three addresses scribbled and crossed out across the front.  The first one is in Kennebunkport, Maine.  Clarke’s heart thunders to a stop.

She doesn’t open it until she’s safely tucked into her top bunk in the hostel.  The room is blessedly empty.  The front desk staff had told her it’d been a slow month and she was only sharing the room with one other girl, named Sophia from Liverpool.

Clarke rips into the envelope with shaking fingers and dumps out its contents.  A piece of hotel stationery covered in looping writing folded around a postcard from Prince Edward Island.

Clarke unfolds the paper first and reads Octavia’s message.  It’s nothing really, empty nothings about her school year and the part-time job she’d gotten at Starbucks.  Their mom must still be alive, Clarke thinks, because Aurora is referred to in the present tense.  Octavia signs off with a “love you!” written above a giant letter O.

Clarke traces her finger across the deep depresses in the paper and collects her thoughts.  Then she turns to the postcard.

_ Wish you were here! _ it trumpets across a heavily photoshopped photo of a lighthouse.  The postmark is from a month and a half earlier.  Charlottetown, the province’s capital.

Bellamy’s tight scrawl is scribbled across the back.

_ Clarke _ , it says.  The tail on the “e” is abnormally long, almost like he couldn’t bring himself to pick the pen up from the surface.

_ You’re right.  Canada is beautiful. _

_ Hope you’re well. _

_ Bell. _

There’s no, “send word” or “love.”  There isn’t even a real salutation.  Just his name, written in a carefully haphazard way that means he thought too long and hard about whether or not he should have added the “amy” to the end.  Clarke’s glad he didn’t.

She flips it over and looks at the lighthouse and feels what might be tears well in the backs of her eyes.

Even after everything tried to shove him down, Bellamy Blake said fuck you and took his life into his own hands.  She knows that not everything could be peachy perfect.  She’d stalked both Blakes on Facebook right after she’d left the states, cursor hovering over their names.

Octavia’s profile picture was with a group of friends, smiling and laughing.  Bellamy’s was just a profile.  He’d cut his hair and was wearing glasses.  His tan had faded slightly but the freckles that had sprung into life across his nose and cheeks were making a valiant last stand.  He had three jobs listed on his profile above Northern Virginia Community College - Alexandria as his school.

The next day Clarke stands in the nave of the Barcelona Cathedral in front of a table of votive candles, eyes on the collection box.  She’s holding two coins in her hands, turning them over and over.  Finally, she drops them in the box and strikes a match.

_ For Octavia _ , she thinks, as she holds it to the wick of a candle.   _ May you have the life your brother wants for you. _

She pauses, letting the match burn down almost to her fingers before she blows it out.

“You ready?” someone asks behind her.

Clarke turns her head.  Sophie, her camera around her neck, cardigan draped over the thin straps of her dress.

“Just a minute,” Clarke says and Sophie nods, glancing back down towards the altar.

She strikes another match and takes a deep breath.  She takes a second candle and holds it up.

“For Bellamy,” she whispers.  “I will always remember you.”

The twin flames flicker and Clarke forces herself to turn away.

“Who’s Bellamy?” Sophie asks later as they wander through a square bustling with locals, tourists, and a gaggle of pigeons fighting over an abandoned sandwich.  “Old boyfriend?”

Clarke pauses.  Bellamy is and always will be so much more than that.  But Clarke didn’t know how to explain a bond she barely understood herself.

“Something like that.”

 

It’s June 27th and there’s a beat-up international air mail envelope in Bellamy’s mailbox.  It was redirected from the Kennebunkport post office, with the address for the house on King’s Highway scratched out and taped over.

The return address is for a C. Griffin in Belfast.

Bellamy’s hands are shaking.

He’d mailed the postcard on a whim, not even sure if it would find its way to Clarke wherever she was.  Apparently it had and this is her answer.

Inside the envelope there are two individual envelopes, one addressed to Octavia and the other to him.  He sets the one for his sister aside and opens his own.  There’s a folded up piece of paper accompanied by a small stack of photos.

He unfolds the paper and reads.

_ Bell, _

_ Thank you for writing.  I’m glad you finally made it to Canada though I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to see it with you.  I’m in Belfast for a few more days then moving on.  I’m not sure where to yet.  If you ever need to contact me, feel free to send mail through my father.  His address is at the bottom of this letter. _

_ I hope you and Octavia are both doing well. Please pass on the letter I’ve enclosed for her. _

_ Thank you. _

_ Clarke _

Underneath she’s scribbled an address in New York City.

Bellamy puts the letter aside and picks up the stack of photographs.  He flips through them slowly, eyes searching over the images, the fine details.  Clarke, or whoever had taken the photos, is a good photographer.  She’s not in any of them but here and there are a few wisps of what might be blonde hair in the bottom corners.  On the back of each one she’s written the location, names of fanciful places that, if things had worked out differently, he might have been able to see with her.

Berlin.  Munich.  Rome.  Milan. Paris.  Lyon.  London.  Dublin.  San Sebastian.  Capri.  Zurich.  Belgrade.  Oslo.  Vienna.  They blur past his eyes in a flurry of letters.

Bellamy closes his eyes and tips back onto his bed.  He doesn’t think about the late shift he has to work at the bar tonight or how he has to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to open the coffee shop.  He doesn’t think about how he has a paper due in two days for world history that he hasn’t started, or how Octavia’s driving lessons start next Tuesday.  Instead, he lets himself wander the streets of European cities, Clarke’s hand in his, and he dreams.

 

Exactly a year after she boarded a plane for Berlin, Clarke touches down at Boston Logan airport.

Both her parents are waiting for her in arrivals.  Where Jake’s face is open and excited, Abby’s is drawn.  Clarke hasn’t spoken to her mother outside of perfunctory texts and emails for major holidays since the blowup over Brown.  She can’t say she’s excited about meeting face to face.

Nevertheless, she hugs both her parents, burying her face in the familiar material of her father’s sweatshirt.  This trip is meant to only be a short one but Jake had been begging her to come back at least for a little while for two months.

There’s a letter she can’t wait to share with them burning hole in her worn backpack but that can wait.  For now she lets her father shoulder her duffel and lead her out to their car.

She waits until they’re seated around the familiar circular table of her childhood home to pull the letter out.  It’s crinkled from weeks crushed into her backpack but the papers inside have been kept safe and secure.

“I, uh, know that neither of you was particularly impressed when I decided not to go to Brown,” she says slowly, smoothing out the envelope.  “But I’m glad I didn’t.”

She searches both her parents’ faces.  They both wait.

“The last year was incredible.  I went to a lot of places I thought I’d never see and met a lot of people I would have never otherwise met.  And I barely even scratched the surface of all the places I’d like to to go one day.”  She pauses.  “But I think I’m going to be settling down, at least for a little while.”

Jake is the one to take the envelope.  His eyes flash briefly to the logo in the top corner before opening it and unfolding the paper.  His face breaks into a wide smile.

“Clarke, honey, this is amazing.  I’m so proud of you.”

Clarke grins, and feels a sob rising in the back of her throat.  “Thanks, Dad.”

Abby takes the paper and scans it.  “The American University of Paris?”

“Yeah.  They have a great fine arts program.”  She stares across the table at her mother, challenging.  “I got in on a scholarship.  Tuition’s free.”

“Congratulations.”  There’s no stiffness in Abby’s voice, perhaps surprising both of them.

“Thank you.”

Wells is home on his summer break and they meet at Clarke’s favorite coffee shop.  Wells is waiting inside for her with an iced chai on the table next to his own black coffee.  Clarke slides into the chair and takes a long sip, groaning.  Wells grins at her.

“I figured you missed those.”

“Oh, my God, so much.”

He beams at her.  “Hey, stranger.”

“Hey,” she grins back.  “How’ve you been?  You running the country yet?”

He laughs.  “Working on it.”

They’d kept in touch slightly over the last few months.  Clarke had emailed him a constant stream of pictures and they’d chatted amiably about his time at Harvard and her favorite parts of whatever city she was in. But Clarke hadn’t heard his voice or seen his face since the day he’d left Kennebunkport.  She’d asked to keep it that way, claiming that if she saw or heard him, it’d just bring down too much homesickness on her.  Seeing him now is like a breath of fresh air, a waft of a familiar scent, the softness of your favorite childhood blanket.

“How’s it feel to be back?”

“Weird,” she admits.  “But it’s a good weird.”

“How long are you in town for?”

“Just a week.”

He nods.  “Well, we’ll be hanging out every day of that week.”

She smiles.  “Naturally.”

“And I’ll also be coming to visit you.  Literally all the time.”

“You did always want to go to Paris.”

He grins and reaches out to take her hand.  “I missed you, Clarkey.”

She squeezes his fingers.  “I missed you, too.  But I had to go.”

“I know.  I’m just glad you came back, even if it was only for a little while.”  He pauses. “You going to be okay to sleep in that house?”

She waves a hand dismissively. “She’s fine.  I think she knows that she can’t walk all over me anymore.”

He nods.  “Good, good.”  He bites his lip.

“Just ask, Wells.”

His gaze flies up to hers.  “Ask...what?”  But the deer in headlights look in his eyes gives him away.

“I know it’s eating you.  Just ask.”

“Bellamy?”

“We haven’t spoken.  Not really.  He, uh, sent me a postcard.  In November.  I sent him a letter back in June.  That’s it.”

“Are you going to reach out to him?”

She shakes her head.  “It wouldn’t do any good for anyone.  Nothing’s changed about our circumstances.”

“We’re friends on Facebook now.”

“I noticed.”

“They’re doing well.”

“Good.  I’m glad to hear that.”

Wells nods.  “Their mother died two months ago.”

Clarke presses her hand to her mouth.  Wells nods.  “Yeah.  I went to the funeral.”  He pauses.  “Bellamy asked me to say hello when I next saw you.  So Bellamy says hello.”

Clarke nods slowly, eyes tracing the grain of the table.

“Do you still...love him?”

“I’ll always love him,” she answers simply.

 

When Octavia starts receiving college acceptance letters, Bellamy calls another realtor.  She’ll be leaving in the beginning of September for one of any of the colleges that offered her a hefty scholarship for her 3.9 GPA and three years on her high school’s varsity women’s golf team.  Bellamy himself is planning on moving into DC in search of a shitty apartment with hopefully low rent within public transportation’s reach of George Washington University.  It’s years later than he had originally been planning on attending school, but he has an associate’s in liberal arts and sciences from Northern Virginia Community College and the admissions department had assured him that he could graduate with a bachelor’s in history and a master’s in secondary education in four years.

There are still times when Bellamy looks at the framed photo of Aurora Blake that he still keeps on their mantel and wishes that things were different.

Sometimes he wishes that their father had never left.

Sometimes he wishes that Aurora had never decided to buy that house in Kennebunkport.

Sometimes he wishes that she had never gotten sick.

Sometimes he wishes that everything had been different.

But the one thing that he never wishes is that he hadn’t met Clarke.

A key turns in the front door and Octavia comes in, backpack slung over her shoulder, hair a mess from the wind.

“Hey,” she says, dumping her backpack on the ground with a thud.

“Hey yourself.  How was school?”

She rolls her eyes.  “Exhausting.  AP exams are kicking my ass.”

He ruffles her hair.  For once, she doesn’t shove his hand away.  “You’re almost there.”

“You working tonight?”

“Nope.”

“ _ House Hunters  _ marathon?”

“I already ordered pizza.”

“You’re the best, Bell,” she says as she hands him the remote and collapses on the sofa.

Sometimes Bellamy wishes that things had turned out differently.  But he knows he’s glad that they didn’t.  He wouldn’t trade any of it for the world.

 

Clarke receives a second letter from Bellamy in July four years after she first left for Europe.  It arrives inside a larger package from her father.  The letter is addressed to the address for his New York apartment Clarke gave Bellamy three years earlier.  There’s no note, just a single picture placed carefully into the envelope.

The picture is of Octavia Blake in a black cap and gown, a tassel hanging down on the left side, clutching her diploma and beaming.  Four graduation cords hang around her neck.  One is an earthy gold that Clarke recognizes from her own high school graduation.  National Honor Society.

An arm that Clarke knows belongs to Bellamy is slung around her shoulder, squeezing her to his side.  Clarke can just make out the letters GWU on the lanyard dripping out of his jeans pocket.

Her heart swells with pride and happiness for the both of them.

When she leaves for work the next morning, she drops an envelope off in a mailbox on her way out the door.

_ I’m happy for both of you _ is the only thing written on the slip of paper inside.  She doesn’t include a return address.

 

A year and a half after Bellamy starts teaching at a school in DC he’s invited to the opening of the Smithsonian’s newest exhibit, a joint exhibition between the National Gallery in London and the Smithsonian American Art Museum designed to showcase the evolving relationship between the two countries over the years.

The front of the building is awash in the flashing of paparazzi’s flashbulbs and the steps to the museum are covered in men and women posing in ball gowns and tuxes.  Bellamy pushes his way through the crowd, flashes his invitation at the door and steps inside.

He knows that a handful of his colleagues will also be here but he can’t see any of them yet.  He snags a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and steps into the crowd.

The crowd is equally full of British accents as it is of American ones.  He’d heard that the National Gallery flew over half of its art historians and curators to make sure that the art was installed correctly and survived the trip but he hadn’t been expecting this many foreigners.

He somehow finds his way to the patio space.  The doors are usually closed but tonight they’re flung open, letting in the chilly fall air.  The sunset burns bright against the sky and he pauses to look at it, fiddling with one of his cufflinks.

His eyes fall from the sky to the lone figure standing at the railing, also clutching a champagne glass, this one empty.  He freezes.

It’s been seven years but Bellamy knew he would never forget the golden undertones of her hair or the curve of her neck, the soft slope of her shoulder blades as they shift under her skin.  Her dress is a soft lilac green, strapless, flowing over her curves effortlessly.  His fingers twitch.

And then he’s not in Washington, D.C. anymore.  He’s not standing alone, carrying a flute of champagne.  He’s not Bellamy Blake, 26, AP US History and sometimes art teacher.

He’s being pulled through the crowded ranks of the Kennebunkport River Club, his sister’s fingers insistent around his wrist.  He’s Bellamy Blake, 18, and he’s staring at Clarke Griffin’s back as she leans out over the railing of the patio, staring out at the water.  And he’s thinking about how he’ll never see her again.

He blinks and he’s back in the Smithsonian.  But he’s still staring at Clarke Griffin’s back as she leans out over the railing, staring out at the sunset.

“Clarke?” he manages.

The champagne glass in her hand falls to the ground, shattering.  Bellamy barely hears the noise because she’s turning and her eyes are wide with disbelief.

He can’t believe he ever thought he’d forget their exact shade of blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has followed me on the journey of posting this fic. I very much enjoyed writing and sharing this fic with all of you and I hope you all like the ending!
> 
> And come find me on [Tumblr!](http://andrevvminyard.tumblr.com)


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